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		<title>Insecurity and Dispossession</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/insecurity-and-dispossession/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=insecurity-and-dispossession</link>
		
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
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		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Financialization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Housing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HR Sodeifi]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>HR Sodeifi on the roots of Canada’s housing crisis – and what’s to be done about it.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/insecurity-and-dispossession/">Insecurity and Dispossession</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">10. 31. 2024</h3><h1>Insecurity and Dispossession</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><b>HR Sodeifi</b><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />While housing affordability has been a problem in Canada for decades, it has become much more acute in the 21st century, reaching crisis levels in recent years. Neoliberal policies designed to liberalize and deregulate markets and reduce the role of the state in the economy – ultimately aiming to restore capitalist profitability – both undermined the construction of social housing and created the conditions for the accelerated commodification of homes</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are witnessing the results. Tens of thousands of people are homeless across the country while, thanks to cutbacks, cities lack adequate resources to provide support. Some unhoused people are sheltering in tents in park encampments, under bridges, and in other public spaces, only to be attacked by police forces and right-wing politicians who, instead of fighting poverty, criminalize the poor. Hundreds of thousands of other homeless people are estimated to fall into the category of “hidden homeless”: lucky enough to have friends or family who let them stay over for a few nights, or to have a car to sleep in, but without any kind of permanent shelter. For racialized, urban Indigenous, and other marginalized people, as one might suspect, the situation is often </span><a href="https://www.acto.ca/production/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Factsheet-4-Homelessness-in-Canada-and-Ontario2.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">disproportionately bad</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slightly higher up the ladder are renters, who live in constant danger of eviction and significant rent increases. More than 40% of tenants in Canada </span><a href="https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2023/ccdp-chrc/HR34-7-2022-eng.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pay unaffordable rents</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, where affordability is defined as personal housing expenses amounting to no more than 30% of gross income. Many renters pay more than half of their disposable income on rent – in some cases up to 80%. As a result, working families have had to cut back on many other necessities, including food, leading to </span><a href="https://foodbankscanada.ca/food-banks-across-canada-report-almost-2-million-visits-in-one-month/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a massive increase in food bank visits</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> since 2019.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Working families and individuals who have “purchased” a home in recent years have had to take on significant mortgages – debt – while many of those with existing mortgages have seen their monthly payments increase due to higher interest rates. Many younger people have given up on the idea of ever owning their own home.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Corporate landlords and financial institutions, by contrast, are </span><a href="https://financialpost.com/fp-finance/banking/canadian-banks-outsized-reliance-on-mortgages-could-slow-margin-recovery"><span style="font-weight: 400;">profiting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from the insecurity and unaffordability of housing – profiting, that is, from housing precarity that too often leads to homelessness</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p> </p><h2><b></b>Roots of the current crisis</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 1993, the federal Liberal government of Jean Chretien, pursuing a neoliberal deficit-cutting agenda, eliminated all funding for social (government-subsidized) housing and downloaded the associated expenses to the provinces and territories. This move effectively ended the construction of social housing in Canada. It was a sharp retreat from the federal government’s active, if imperfect, involvement in creating affordable public housing in the 1960s and ’70s. A 1977 </span><a href="https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/anatomy-of-a-crisis.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">study</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by the right-wing Fraser Institute pointed to federal policies aimed to discourage private ownership of rental dwellings – and to encourage the development of not-for-profit and government-owned rental units – as an example of how housing policy had effectively become “an instrument to redistribute income in favour of lower income households</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The federal government’s abandonment of such policies in the 1990s coincided with the liberalization of financial rules, including the introduction of REITs (real estate investment trusts) in Canada: financial instruments able to derive income from real estate assets and benefit from preferential low tax rates. These shifts led to </span><a href="https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2023/ccdp-chrc/HR34-7-2022-eng.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">increased commodification of real estate and an increase in housing prices</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.<br /><br /></span></p><p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-8350 size-large aligncenter" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.56.07 AM-1024x433.png" alt="" width="1024" height="433" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.56.07 AM-1024x433.png 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.56.07 AM-300x127.png 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.56.07 AM-768x325.png 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.56.07 AM.png 1240w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />The chart above shows how the acceleration in residential property prices in Canada begins at roughly the same time as the construction of social housing stops and financial markets become more liberalized. A similar pattern can be seen in other countries. In the US, for example, related dynamics gave rise to a massive housing bubble and its subsequent collapse in 2008, necessitating trillions of dollars in public funds to bail out the financial system that had created the problem and benefited from it, and inaugurating the economic downturn known as the Great Recession.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Changes to housing policy and the liberalization of financial rules and regulations are only part of the reason why speculative capital has increasingly flowed towards housing. By the late 1990s, the neoliberal reshaping of the economy – initiated by the likes of UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan, and designed to restore profitability by attacking labour and the post-war welfare state – was faltering. Profit rates were </span><a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/12/18/the-us-rate-of-profit-in-2021/#:~:text=Between%201945%20and%202021%2C%20the,rate%20of%20profit%20fell%2044%25."><span style="font-weight: 400;">once again declining</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. In search of profit, money began to flow to the housing market, driven by financial institutions, state-sponsored pushes toward home ownership, and low interest rate policies adopted by central banks to </span><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/storm-clouds-over-capitalism-in-canada/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">stimulate economic activity</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. While in the US and many other countries, these dynamics pushed the commodification of housing into hyperdrive, in Canada the process was much slower due to more restrictive banking regulations. In turn, while the collapse of the US housing bubble resulted in the demise of major investment banks and a significant drop in the price of shelter within and beyond the United States, in Canada the recession caused only a temporary pause followed by renewed real estate market activity and price increases.<br /><br /></span> <img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-8351 aligncenter" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.57.35 AM-1024x639.png" alt="" width="1024" height="639" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.57.35 AM-1024x639.png 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.57.35 AM-300x187.png 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.57.35 AM-768x479.png 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-10.57.35 AM.png 1196w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />Despite a massive injection of public funds to bail out banks and many other corporations, business investment after the Great Recession remained subdued. </span><a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/overproduction-and-capitalist-crisis/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Overaccumulation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in the lead-up to the recession had kept overcapacity high – that is, production capacity exceeding demand – and profit expectations low. In 2012, the governor of the Bank of Canada </span><a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/free-up-dead-money-carney-exhorts-corporate-canada/article4493091/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">went as far as to chastise corporations</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for sitting on huge piles of cash and not investing in the economy</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Yet the logic of capital is to pursue profit, and if the prospect of making a profit by investing in productive business activities is dim, capital will not invest in those activities no matter how much money it has at its disposal or what the governor of a central bank says. A lot of those funds instead started flowing into the Canadian housing market. The result was a dramatic increase in the price of housing of all types.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When a working person or family purchases a house, they buy a home to live in, perhaps hoping to raise a family there and be part of a community. They are interested, in other words, in the usefulness of their home for their lives: what marxist theory calls the home’s use value. Over time, as that owner pays off their mortgage, their home becomes an asset to support their retirement, to assist the next generation, or both. Indeed, the single biggest repository of savings and wealth for most working people in Canada is their home, if they own one. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Investors, on the other hand, aren’t concerned with a home’s use value. Investors view a home as a commodity, a potential source of profit and/or income flow. They care little about the schools nearby, the community, local parks, and quality of life. They are interested only in the exchange value of the house: how much profit they can generate from their investment, either through rents or resale. This commodification of housing, part of a process commonly referred to as “financialization,” subordinates use value to exchange value.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Commodification drove a speculative increase in Canadian home prices after the Great Recession. One clear expression of this phenomenon was (and remains) the disconnect between the increase in real incomes and housing prices.<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-8352 aligncenter" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-11.00.34 AM-1024x637.png" alt="" width="1024" height="637" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-11.00.34 AM-1024x637.png 1024w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-11.00.34 AM-300x187.png 300w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-11.00.34 AM-768x478.png 768w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-30-at-11.00.34 AM.png 1276w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />This commodification of housing was not limited to single-family homes. When the federal government stopped funding the development of affordable housing in the 1990s, real estate investment trusts owned zero rental suites. By 2021, REITs owned nearly 200,000 units in Canada, and financial firms held nearly 30% of the country’s purpose-built rental housing – and were acquiring more at an accelerating pace. Not surprisingly, one result has been rising rents and increasing displacement of tenants. A common profit-maximization strategy among REITs has been to “re-position” lower-cost affordable buildings (“under-performing assets”) to “add value” for investors: by raising rents, cutting costs, and </span><a href="https://renovictionsto.com/know-your-rights"><span style="font-weight: 400;">renovicting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> long-term tenants paying rent-controlled rates</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This pattern can also be seen in the seniors’ living sector, where</span><a href="https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2023/ccdp-chrc/HR34-7-2022-eng.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> financial firms own 22% of long-term care homes (LTCs) and 42% of retirement properties</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Canada. The neoliberal restructuring and drive towards privatization of healthcare have contributed to this trend.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In generating opportunities for investors to profit from housing, this process has effected a significant transfer of wealth from those who can least afford it to those who are better off. </span><a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230331/dq230331b-eng.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">By the end of 2022</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, while the wealthiest 20% of the population accounted for more than two-thirds of Canada’s net worth, the bottom 40% accounted for just 2.6% of net worth in the country – and had seen their net worth </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">decrease by 16.3 per cent compared to the previous year</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Rent has become, increasingly, a means of dispossession. As a group, renters experience what economists call net dis-saving: they spend more than they earn. </span><a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240417/dq240417b-eng.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to Statistics Canada</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, while the dis-saving rate worsened for households in the bottom 60% of income distribution in 2023 compared to a year earlier, those at the very top benefited from their financial asset gains during the same period</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The housing crisis we have before us is thus the fruition of nearly 40 years of capitalist restructuring of the Canadian housing market. Neoliberal ideologues believe the capitalist market is the best and most efficient means of allocating scarce resources.   What they fail to appreciate, or intentionally aim to obscure, is that capitalist production is production to create profit. Sometimes, the process of creating profit generates a beneficial result such as the output of helpful goods and services. But that benefit is </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">incidental</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and not the primary goal of capitalist production. Apologists of this system point to these accidental results to propagate the false belief that capitalist markets are the solution to human needs. But as we can see clearly today, capitalist markets do not necessarily provide what is needed.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p><h2>Responses from above and below</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2017, the Trudeau Liberals, acknowledging Canada’s housing affordability “challenges,” unveiled their National Housing Strategy. It offered a very limited goal of reducing homelessness by 50% by 2027 and slightly mitigating the severity of housing supply gaps. The Trudeau government has failed to deliver on even these unambitious goals. Instead, in 2023 it announced it would remove the goods and services tax (GST) on purpose-built rental units, to “incentivize” construction. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In provinces such as Ontario, the provincial government in power has used the housing crisis as a justification for getting rid of environmental regulations, so developers can reduce their costs and “build faster.” Despite the gutting of such regulations, and the federal government’s GST rebate, new housing starts have actually declined in the last year, as higher interest rates have made housing units less attractive to investors. Profit, or the lack thereof, is once again the determining factor.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At the grassroots level, there have been some important mobilizations by tenants taking matters into their own hands and resisting above-guideline rent increases and renovictions. In several buildings in Toronto, for example, tenants have </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxNBvgC_zXQ&amp;feature=youtu.be"><span style="font-weight: 400;">been on a rent strike for over a year</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. This kind of action not only builds solidarity among tenants, but it also increases the cost of operating these buildings, making investors think twice about their plans. It also helps focus attention on housing issues more generally – including whether a home should be treated as a profit-generating commodity.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Housing is an essential and basic human need. It is a human right. We must demand that our governments ensure all people, regardless of their income, have access to a secure, long-term, adequate, and affordable home. Meeting this demand requires, first and foremost, the construction of high-quality, truly affordable social housing on a massive scale, involving all levels of governments. It is also necessary to put policies in place to ban profiteering in the housing market, expressing clearly that homes are not commodities. As well, we need to guarantee adequate income support, retirement, and pension benefits to working people, so nobody feels home ownership is the only path to a dignified old age. Ultimately, if we really want to solve the housing crisis, we need to fundamentally change the social and economic structures of our society, working towards a transformed society that places human needs above profit.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">HR Sodeifi is an Ontario-based economist and has been monitoring the housing market over the last number of years.</span></p>						</div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/insecurity-and-dispossession/">Insecurity and Dispossession</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Solidarity with Palestine Means Struggling Against our Own Ruling Classes</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/solidarity-with-palestine-means-struggling-against-our-own-ruling-classes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=solidarity-with-palestine-means-struggling-against-our-own-ruling-classes</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joseph Daher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian liberation]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8302</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Joseph Daher on ways forward for the Palestine liberation movement in the West, and how freedom struggles across the Middle East and North Africa are bound up with the fight for a free Palestine.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/solidarity-with-palestine-means-struggling-against-our-own-ruling-classes/">Solidarity with Palestine Means Struggling Against our Own Ruling Classes</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">10. 8. 2024</h3><h1>Solidarity with Palestine Means Struggling Against our Own Ruling Classes</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>Joseph Daher</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><br />An <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">article</a> published in July 2024 by the British medical science journal <i>The Lancet</i> suggested Israel’s ongoing attack on the Gaza Strip may have caused as many as 186,000 Palestinian deaths so far. Writing in <i>The Guardian </i>in September, Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/scientists-death-disease-gaza-polio-vaccinations-israel">estimated</a> that if mortality in Gaza were to continue at the current rate – about 23,000 deaths a month – it could reach about 335,500 deaths in total. Fighting to put an end to such atrocities is not a Palestinian cause alone, but a necessity for left and progressive movements around the world – and a struggle that is giving those movements fresh life.</p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza shows no sign of ending. Negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have not reached any successful conclusion. Israel has continuously added new conditions in the negotiations and refuses to withdraw its troops from Gaza: along the </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmSBej06bZ8"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Netzarim corridor</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in the center of the strip, and particularly along the </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/03/what-is-the-philadelphi-corridor-israel-gaza-egypt-netanyahu"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Philadelphi corridor</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on the border with Egypt, as well as at the adjacent Rafah crossing point. At the end of August, Brigadier General Elad Goren was appointed head of a re-established Israeli civil administration in the Gaza Strip, a new position within the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit – the defense ministry unit responsible for coordinating civilian and humanitarian affairs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, further entrenching Israel’s occupation.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At the same time, a new large military operation began at the end of August in the occupied West Bank, with violence on a scale not seen in 20 years. Within a few days, neighbourhoods in several cities had been targeted, with dozens of civilians murdered, displaced, and besieged, and a lot of civilian infrastructure destroyed. In early October, an Israeli bombing of the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank killed at least 20 people. It was the deadliest Israeli strike in the West Bank since 2000. These developments follow months of escalating violence against Palestinians by the Israeli occupation army and settlers in the West Bank, who have together </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/deadly-israeli-strike-west-bank-highlights-spread-war-2024-10-04/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">assassinated more than 700 people since October 7</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. They have also seized more than 2000 hectares of land, declared them state property, and given Israeli Jews exclusive rights to lease them. Israel has now transferred vast swaths of sovereignty over the West Bank from the military to the far right-dominated civilian government and its ministries, granting the latter full authority over the acquisition and development of new settlements. The main objective of the Israeli strategy in the West Bank is its annexation, by dispossessing the Palestinians and confiscating their lands. Israel has also significantly escalated its criminal attacks against Lebanon in the past few weeks, leading to the death of more than 1000 people, the forced displacement of more than a million persons, and massive destruction.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The need to struggle for Palestinian liberation remains crucial today, a year after the beginning of a new Israeli genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and amidst a growing danger of all-out regional war. So what’s the way forward for the Palestinian solidarity movement in Western countries, and for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region more generally?</span></p><p> </p><h2>No alternative to organizing large popular movements from below</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The most important task for those outside the MENA region is to win over the left, unions, progressive groups, and existing social movements to build a strong mass popular movement in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, and to support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Inspired by the South African struggle against apartheid, several hundred Palestinian civil society organizations launched that campaign in 2005, calling for sustained boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and basic human rights principles. The BDS campaign puts the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people at the centre of the Palestine solidarity movement. The campaign’s three main demands are 1) ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the wall that Israel has constructed alongside a long stretch of the West Bank; 2) recognizing the fundamental right of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to absolute equality; and 3) respecting, protecting, and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The BDS movement also includes a call for academic boycott, as promoted by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), launched in April 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in Ramallah, the administrative centre of the West Bank. The academic boycott is a peaceful action that targets relations with academic institutions involved in human rights violations. It is important to clarify that the demand to suspend academic relations is not aimed at Israeli students or scholars, but at institutional relations. While a “<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza">scholasticide</a>” has been taking place in the Gaza Strip, no Israeli university administration has asked the Israeli government to stop bombing Palestinian universities and intentionally destroying Palestinian higher education.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The main task of a large popular movement for Palestine is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting not only the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinians, but also Israel’s attacks on other countries in the region such as Lebanon. The movement must pressure those ruling classes to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv. No one should expect Western ruling classes to easily change their political positions regarding Israel. But never in history have the ruling classes granted genuine democracy or justice except under pressure from working-class mobilization from below.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">International solidarity is absolutely needed as Palestinians face not only the state of Israel but its imperialist backers as well. This has been the case since the establishment of the Zionist movement, through to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. From its origins in 19th century Europe to the killing and displacement of Palestinians today, Zionism has been a settler-colonial project. To establish, maintain, and expand its territory, the Israeli state has carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land, driving them from their homes and jobs. Throughout this process, Israel has allied itself with, and received support from, imperialist powers: first the British Empire, then the United States, which uses Israel as its agent in its fight against the various forms of Arab nationalism and socialism in the region, and against any other actors challenging its imperial influence. It is also important to note that in 1947 the USSR voted with the United States at the United Nations to partition Palestine, and Czechoslovakia was the first state to deliver arms to Israel. Soviet leaders hoped that newly created Israel would ally itself with Moscow and serve as a counterweight in the region against British-aligned Arab monarchies such as Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The United States and other imperialist powers, such as Canada, France, and Great Britain, have deputized Israel to be their local police force mobilized against the revolutionary transformation of the region, an event that would challenge American control over the MENA area’s strategic energy reserves. Because Israel is a state predicated on the displacement of a people with deep roots on the land the state claims, which arouses the anger and hostility of the region’s masses, Israel is forced to rely on imperial patronage and make itself such an instrument against radical change in the Middle East.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Palestine as a political compass for leftist and progressive forces</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At the same time, within the mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine throughout the world, many participants have increasingly made connections between Palestinian liberation and how feminism, ecology, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism can be advanced in their own societies. In mobilizations for a free Palestine, we can find large numbers of people who want a society radically different from the one we&#8217;re living in, and who are willing to work towards it. The role of left activists and networks here is to help organize Palestine solidarity movements that challenge our own ruling classes by showing their political, economic, and military connections with the Israeli ruling classes. The ruling classes of the world share experiences, lessons, and other resources with each other to defend their authoritarian neoliberal order. For example, in addition to remaining a key ally of US-led Western imperialism, the Israeli state exports its arms throughout the world. It markets the weapons, security systems, and various advanced technologies used against Palestinians, helping other states repress their own populations and militarize their borders against migrants. According to the Israeli defense exports department, the country’s arms exports totaled $13.1 billion in 2023, an all-time high. Israel has nearly doubled its arms exports in the last five years.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The genocidal war on Gaza is a reflection of our time’s deep global political crisis. Israel’s outspoken, unapologetic racist repression of the Palestinian population has become a model that far-right and right-wing neoliberal parties around the world would like to follow: ignoring international law and dealing however they want with non-white populations, whether those are new migrants or other minorities. This is partly why solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and support for the BDS campaign have been increasingly criminalized in Western states. The criminalization of Palestine solidarity today serves to normalize attacks on fundamental democratic rights by the ruling classes and the state, expanding state control. To differing degrees, those attacks may befall anyone who challenges those in power and the system they administer.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Similarly, a large majority of the MENA region’s popular classes identify with the Palestinian struggle and see their own local battles for democracy and equality as bound up with that struggle’s victory. When Palestinians fight, it potentially triggers the regional movement for liberation, and the regional movement feeds back into the one in occupied Palestine – a dialectical relationship. It is necessary to consider the Palestinian and regional popular classes as the central social forces capable of creating the conditions required to achieve liberation, with our support.</span></p><p> </p><h2>No shortcuts</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course, there are many obstacles to building a large popular movement able both to stand in solidarity with Palestine and to offer an internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and feminist perspective. Such movement-building is difficult in many countries of the world, but even more difficult in Palestine and the wider MENA region. This difficulty can lead some groups and individuals on the left to lose faith in the possibility of change from below and instead to place their hopes for the liberation of Palestine in the actions of allied states. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Gulf monarchies and Turkey did make a show of support for the Palestinians, condemning Israel’s war. Yet most states in the region have remained relatively passive in the face of Palestinian suffering over the past year, as well as when Israel has again bombed Lebanon.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Take the case of Iran. Hamas’s main regional ally, Iran has sought since October 7 to improve its standing in the region so as to be in the best position for future political and economic negotiations with the US. Iran wishes to guarantee its political and security interests, and is therefore keen to avoid any direct war with Israel. Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is not to liberate them, but to use them as leverage, particularly in its relations with the United States. Similarly, Iran’s passivity in the deepening war against Lebanon, and in the wake of the assassination of key Hezbollah political and military cadres including Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, also suggests its first priority is protecting its own geopolitical interests. Iran has also not hesitated in the past to reduce its funding for Hamas when their interests did not coincide: Tehran significantly decreased its financial assistance to Hamas after an historic mass uprising erupted in Syria in 2011 and the Palestinian movement refused to support the Syrian regime’s murderous repression of Syrian protesters.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Despite Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdo</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ğ</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">an’s criticism of Israel and his government’s ban on domestic trade with the Israeli state (in place since May 2024), Turkey and Israel maintain close economic ties. According to data released by the Turkish Exporters’ Assembly (TIM), Turkish businesses <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkish-exports-reach-israel-goods-palestine-skyrocket">appear to be bypassing the trade ban</a> by routing exports through Palestinian Authority customs: there was an 423% increase in exports to Palestine during the first eight months of 2024, with exports in August alone surging by over 1150%, climbing from USD $10M last year to USD $127M. Trade between both countries has also been ongoing through third countries such as Greece. In addition, Turkey and Israel found common ground during Azerbaijan’s recent military aggression in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, controlled and populated primarily by Armenians. Israeli and Turkish drones, as well as support from both countries’ intelligence services, proved essential to Azerbaijan’s victory over the Armenian armed forces. More than 100,000 Armenians, nearly the entire pre-conflict population, were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh and become refugees.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The interests of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf and Arab states are very much entangled with US imperialism. These states are unlikely to endanger their relationships with the US for the sake of the Palestinians. Rather than advance the Palestinian struggle, these regimes tend to restrict their support for the cause to areas where it advances their own regional interests and betray it when it doesn’t. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">More generally, grassroots progressive forces need not align themselves with imperialist or sub-imperialist states that each compete for political gains and strive to intensify their exploitation of resources and working people. Of course, US imperialism remains exceptionally destructive and deadly through its military, political, and economic powers. But to choose one imperialism over another is to guarantee the stability of the capitalist system and the exploitation of popular classes.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Re-organizing for the future</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Left and progressive forces must of course defend the Palestinians’ right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. Similarly, the Lebanese have the right to resist Israeli aggression. Defending the right of people to resist oppression should not be confused with political support for the specific political projects of Hamas or Hezbollah in their respective societies, or lead us to imagine these parties will be able to deliver Palestinian liberation or that they have a </span><a href="https://resistancebooks.org/product/palestine-and-marxism/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">strategy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in this direction.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That said, in Western societies the best way to serve Palestinian liberation today is, as described above, to build strong local popular solidarity movements and push forward BDS campaigns. We need also to cultivate regional and internationalist analyses in our movements, believing in the common interests and common destiny of popular and working classes. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Despite the ongoing nightmare we have witnessed since October 7, 2023, with the genocide in Gaza persisting and fresh threats of regional war, two positive points can be made regarding the Palestinian solidarity movement. First, the BDS campaign has made substantial gains, with many companies divesting from Israel, academic boycotts, and workers’ strikes and walk-outs in solidarity with Palestine. The post-October 7 radicalization towards the left among particular sectors of the organized working class is particularly significant, as noted by the website </span><a href="https://www.workersinpalestine.org/news/striking-for-palestine-webinar"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Workers in Palestine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: “Workers and trade unions around the world have mobilised for Palestine in a number of ways. Actions have been organised at arms factories, transport workers have refused to handle arms and unions have issued statements committing to not be complicit in Israel’s crimes. More recently, education unions in the US have begun organising strike action in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Perhaps even more significant, the immense mobilizations of solidarity with Palestine, which have contributed to turning Palestine into a political compass, may be creating the conditions for a potential resurrection and re-organization of a left pole within our societies. There is a growing awareness that a victory for the Palestinian cause would be a victory for the entire left – for the whole progressive camp opposed to the destructive impulses of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of fascist movements, which are the two dominant political projects threatening popular and working classes today. Weakening Western ruling classes weakens Israeli apartheid, and vice versa. Struggling for Palestine, important in itself, is also a way to defend the rights of everyone engaged in challenging this unequal, authoritarian world system.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p>Joseph Daher is an internationalist <wbr />anticapitalist and an academic. He teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is the author of <em>Marxism and Palestine</em> (IIRE, 2024), <em>Syria after the Uprisings</em> (Pluto Press, 2019) and <em>Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon&#8217;s Party of God</em> (Pluto Press, 2016). He is the founder of the blog <a href="https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com">Syria Freedom Forever</a>.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/listen-to-disabled-people-or-get-out-of-our-way/"     class="crp_link post-7218"><span class="crp_title">Listen to Disabled People or Get Out of Our Way</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> kate klein and griffin epstein on challenging the labour movement to take the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and disability justice seriously, and on alternative modes of labour organizing when traditional forms fall short.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/revolutionary-possibilities-bloom-when-migrants-fight-back/"     class="crp_link post-6615"><span class="crp_title">Revolutionary Possibilities Bloom When Migrants Fight Back</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> S. K. Hussan on the fight for permanent residency rights for 1.7 million migrants in the Canadian state – a case study in building revolutionary organizing.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/solidarity-with-palestine-means-struggling-against-our-own-ruling-classes/">Solidarity with Palestine Means Struggling Against our Own Ruling Classes</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Welcome the Transformers</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/welcome-the-transformers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-the-transformers</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 21 Sep 2024 16:06:01 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Literary Nonfiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas McKechnie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Transformation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Worm composting]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8265</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Thomas McKechnie on worm composting as a prefigurative practice of transformation.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/welcome-the-transformers/">Welcome the Transformers</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">9. 21. 2024</h3><h1>Welcome the Transformers</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>Thomas McKechnie</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />Since mid-2020, I have been composting with worms, watching them transform food scraps in a Rubbermaid bin in the back of my coat closet. I got into this practice because my apartment building wasn’t sorting garbage, recycling, and compost, and I wanted to ensure my compost was disposed of properly. Organic matter sent to a landfill doesn’t decompose but instead slowly transforms into methane, a greenhouse gas. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Watching worms transform old rotten garbage into new life has been a wonderful, enlightening experience. It offers insights into what transformation requires – insights from which those of us committed to political struggle could benefit.<br /></span></p><p> </p><h2>Crafting an environment</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">You’ll start with two Rubbermaid bins or two five-gallon pails or similar. The first step is to drill holes for drainage and ventilation in one of the bins and set it inside the other. Drainage and ventilation have a significant impact on the health of the bin. Ventilation holes are essential because worms, like other living things, need oxygen. Drainage holes are important because of the nature of worm decomposition. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Moulds, which are constantly circulating invisibly in the air, land on food and begin breaking it down by secreting digestive enzymes. These enzymes dissolve the solid fibres of living things, allowing the mould to draw out nutrients, leaving behind a liquid goo. The worms then come along and slurp up this liquid and the enzymes inside it. Doing so exposes more of the food for the mould to break down and digest. Symbiosis. This process can go wrong, though. When there&#8217;s too much food, the worms can’t drink the liquid as fast as it’s being produced, and the excess liquid becomes toxic when left unprocessed. The drainage holes allow any excess liquid to escape, ensuring the worms have a healthy environment. We are consciously creating the context under which transformation can best occur. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When we seek to make transformation personally and politically, it behooves us to ask: what kind of environment is the change taking place in? How will this environment impact the transformation we’re trying to make? </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I’ve learned a lot about worm composting from doing things the wrong way. I had a bin made from two five-gallon buckets and noticed it had developed a population of springtails. Like worms, springtails eat decaying material. They won’t harm your bin, but worms are preferable for composting because their waste products are beneficial for plants whereas springtails’ wastes are not. I read online that springtails are a sign that a bin may be too wet, so I added dry bedding, hoping it would suck up moisture. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When I checked the next week, the springtails were still there, but the worm population seemed healthy. It looked like there were more worms than ever despite the bin conditions still looking very wet. I threw another bundle of dry bedding in and left it for another week. When I came back, all the worms were dead and rotting at the top of the bin. I discovered the bottom of the bin was full of toxic liquid: the worm population had seemed bountiful only because they were all at the surface trying to escape the toxicity. New to all this, I hadn’t yet learned to routinely empty the bottom bin. Adding dry bedding was a band-aid solution. To make deep transformation, we must seek the root of a problem.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Laying foundations </h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The next step is adding soil to our worm bin. The ground is a foundation to build from, and different foundations allow for different types of buildings.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The ideological foundation of capitalism is that growth is the most important part of life. We must perpetually be growing and innovating to avoid being swallowed up by larger and/or newer competitors. This belief structure has had significant, lasting impacts on the biosphere and the people who are part of it. We are already facing the absolute limits of growth that the planet can tolerate, even while much of the world’s human population remains trapped in a deep poverty that means they can’t and don’t participate in ecologically destructive levels of consumption. On an individual level, many of us are constantly fearful of what will happen if we become unproductive. The threat of eviction, starvation, and prison may hang over us when we consider refusing to be productive, which can make us fearful and compliant. There is no room for weakness, sickness, or death in a world that prioritizes growth at all costs.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Caring for worms requires that I be with the revolting garbage on its way to transformation. We can hold the world in its wholeness only if we are present not just for life and vibrancy, but for death and decay as well. The more we’re willing to let things die, decay, and transform, the freer we are. There are practices in many worldviews that help us grapple with the recognition that change is inevitable. In Buddhism, for example, the Five Remembrances are five facts about life that the Buddha recognized and thought everyone should keep in mind:<br /></span></p><ol><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.<br /><br /></span></span></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.<br /><br /></span></span></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.<br /><br /></span></span></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.<br /><br /></span></span></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.</span></li></ol><p> </p><h2>Rotten luck</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Worms will eat most things that were once alive, but given that they drink their food, they are going to prefer soft, wet foods. Rotten cucumbers, old spinach, a bit of melon. They particularly like bananas and avocado. They don’t like strong, spicy, or citrusy things, so avoid onions, peppers, and oranges. I would also avoid meats, baked goods, and food cooked in oil, as worms wouldn’t encounter those in the wild. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Before I made my first worm composter bin, I would get a feeling at the back of my skull that throbbed and hurt. I don’t think it’s specific to working-class millennials, but I think we experience it profoundly. It’s the feeling of fresh produce you bought going bad. That bag of spinach you barely started, that avocado, yesterday too hard, today brown and rancid. The potato that sprouts eyes before you can even make soup out of it. It feels horrible. It feels horrible in my heart, to reach down for what should be springy and crisp and green and, instead, feel something like hair in the drain.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When that happens, what you are feeling is nature, mid-transformation. The Lakotayapi phrase Mni Wiconi –  Water is Life – was popularized during the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline concentrated around Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota. It is not a metaphor. We are made mostly of water and to water we return. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you’ve found a disgusting handful of semi-liquid spinach, it’s beginning a new transformation. It’s also in an ideal state for your worms. This recognition cured me of the angst that used to follow the discovery of rotting vegetables. I realized that the vegetables haven’t gone bad. They can’t go bad. They’re vegetables. They’re just for someone else. They’re for the worms. The worms don’t want food as I prefer it. My food would be too tough, too dry, too hard to consume. So vegetables are people&#8217;s food or they’re worm food. Either way, the food is good. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Could we look at our lives that way? These are times of great transformation. The Anglo-American empire that has been the</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">dominant power in the world for the last 500 years is rapidly collapsing. The climate is changing, and we’ll see far-reaching transformation to avert that reality’s worst effects or far-reaching transformation because we fail to avert them, or both. This is to say nothing of the emerging neofascism seeking to deny, prevent, and undo all the good transformation we’ve managed to create for ourselves in the last hundred years. Amidst all this, might we nevertheless consider ourselves inestimably blessed to live in a time of so much change? The world is rotten, yes, but rottenness is ready for transformation. It’s ready for the worms.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Both space and time </h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the wild, red wiggler worms live in the layer of leaf litter on the forest floor. In our bins, we’re going to replicate the layer of leaf litter with shredded, moistened cardboard and paper. Bedding is important because bedding is where the eggs get laid and the next generation grows up. We lay the seeds of change where we hope they will be safe till they’re ready to sprout. Transformation needs room to hatch and grow.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When we are attempting to transform, it can be tempting to look for immediate change, but most change takes time. Old neuropathways have to be rewired, old infrastructure repurposed, old centres of power remade. There can be a pressure to show fast results. Yet there will inevitably be missteps and failures while we rehearse new ways of being. Worm babies, like all babies, need time to grow before they can fully take their place in the process of transformation. Time to develop and space to develop are deeply interrelated. A long time spent in a poisonous context won’t necessarily bring about transformation. A short time in a perfect context may not either. That’s why both a healthy context and time to grow are essential for good transformation.</span></p><p> </p><h2>In our thousands, in our millions</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Food will rot even without worms. You could leave your food scraps in a bin by themselves and they would eventually completely transform. That process would be smelly and toxic, and it wouldn’t make beautiful, life-giving byproducts. This applies to all transformations. We are constantly changing, the world is constantly changing. Change is inevitable; good change is not. To make good change, you need to go down into the mess, into the muck, into the rot and decay. You need to take it into you and compost it into something else. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Transformation requires transformers. It requires people who are ready to transform and facilitate transformation. It requires you. It needs you to find the spots that stink of rot and decay and seek to help those struggling there. The key is that we do not do this alone. We do it together, leaning on each other. If you want to make a transformation in your life, you might seek the help of friends, family, healthcare workers, spiritual guides, or ancestral wisdom. I’ve found a worm composting Facebook group to be of endless help as I’ve tried to make transformation with worms. You can make transformation on your own, but there is a reason I start people with 50 worms and not one.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">My mom is a palliative care nurse. I asked her once how she dealt with the fact that all of her clients were there to die. She said that everyone has to die and giving people comfort and dignity through that process is worthwhile. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So much has to die, to decay. How do we be palliative nurses to a decaying empire? How do we transform that which is rotten? How do we compost dystopia? </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I think the worms can show us. </span></p>						</div>
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							<p>Thomas McKechnie is a settler writer and organizer residing in Toronto. As a writer, they create working-class narratives and secular rituals to support liberation. As an organizer, they work in labour and climate justice with a focus on introducing people to political struggle.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/life-making-or-death-making/"     class="crp_link post-3623"><span class="crp_title">Life-making or Death-making?</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Susan Ferguson on how the pandemic has laid bare the social reproduction labour that keeps capitalism churning, the fundamental violence of the capitalist system itself, and emerging possibilities for fighting back.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/welcome-the-transformers/">Welcome the Transformers</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Taking Our Lead from Women Prisoners</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/taking-our-lead-from-women-prisoners/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taking-our-lead-from-women-prisoners</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Aug 2024 14:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abolition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kendra Cowley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Prison For Women Memorial Collective]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Prisons]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8220</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Kendra Cowley on what we can learn from histories of reform and resistance within women’s prisons in the Canadian state.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/taking-our-lead-from-women-prisoners/">Taking Our Lead from Women Prisoners</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">8. 30. 2024</h3><h1>Taking Our Lead from Women Prisoners</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>Kendra Cowley</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><i><br />Women’s contributions to prisoner organizing in Canada have long been overlooked. As such, much of the history of resistance within women’s prisons remains exclusively with the prisoners who lived it. Throughout the winter and spring of 2024, I spoke with the Prison for Women Memorial Collective (P4WMC) as a group, P4WMC members Ann Hansen and Rachel Fayter, and P4WMC Advisory Board member Dr. Isabel Scheuneman Scott about what the history of the Kingston Prison For Women (P4W) has to teach abolitionists today. This article is a culmination of those conversations. </i></p><p>Every <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVVffsS_gmo">Prisoners’ Justice Day</a> since the closure of the Kingston Prison for Women in 2000, former prisoners have met on the prison’s grounds to hold a <a href="https://p4wmemorialcollective.com/prisoners-justice-day/">healing circle and ceremony</a> “in honour of the sisters they <a href="https://springmag.ca/a-prison-abolitionist-monument-for-survival">lost inside</a>,” as the organizers name. The <a href="https://p4wmemorialcollective.com/">Prison for Women Memorial Collective</a> emerged from this 24-year tradition – a group of former prisoners, most of whom served time at P4W, committed to preserving their collective memory. </p><p>P4WMC approached Queen&#8217;s University, the then-landlords of the P4W site, to permit the establishment of a <a href="https://p4wmemorialcollective.com/memorial-garden/">memorial garden</a>. The fight continued when Siderius Developments bought the land in 2017 to build <a href="https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/143-million-project-announced-for-former-prison-for-women-site">Union Park</a>, a luxury condo and retirement community. The collective’s <a href="https://springmag.ca/developers-and-city-of-kingston-aim-to-erase-memory-of-the-prison-for-women">persistent advocacy</a> has highlighted that the legacy of P4W, Canada&#8217;s first federal women’s prison, cannot be buried under luxury developments or revisionist historical narratives.</p><p>And while P4W is rightfully infamous for its inhumane conditions, its legacy is best represented in the proliferation of women’s prisons that came out of its closure. As my conversations with P4WMC demonstrate, prison reforms, including the building of six supposedly more progressive federal women’s prisons, have always been used to expand the scope of penal power under the guise of more humane treatment. The history of P4W illustrates how prison reform in Canada, like incarceration in general, has been a means of punishing women for their perceived deviation from white middle-class femininity. It’s also a history of resistance: a repertoire of tactics that incarcerated women have used to fight for dignity and autonomy, in a context of ostensibly humanitarian reforms that nevertheless expand the reach of prisons.<br /><br /></p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-8222 size-full" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/p4w.jpeg" alt="The former Prison for Women building, seen from outside." width="450" height="600" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/p4w.jpeg 450w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/p4w-225x300.jpeg 225w" sizes="(max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px" /></p><h2><br />The emergence of the Prison For Women and the changing faces of reform</h2><p>The Prison for Women was built on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land in 1934, in what is colonially known as Kingston, Ontario. It was the first federal women’s prison in Canada, and until its closure in 2000, any woman sentenced to two or more years in prison would be sent there, no matter where she was from. Prior to 1934, women were incarcerated primarily in men’s prisons, where they were seen as a social anomaly and a threat to order amongst the men. To remove this threat and, supposedly, better meet the needs of imprisoned women, P4W was built across from the Kingston Penitentiary. The establishment of P4W itself created the “woman prisoner” as a separate kind of prisoner requiring “women-centered” carceral infrastructure.</p><p>In her book <i>Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women in Canada</i>, Kelly Hannah-Moffat describes how P4W was shaped by colonial white supremacy, Victorian morality, and the norms of white femininity that followed from them. The women’s prison functioned as a site of maternalistic discipline, where white women reformers sought to mold incarcerated women into well-behaved homemakers, through “live-in” homemaker programs, forced alterations to personal appearance, manipulation of prisoners’ social habits, and vocational training dedicated exclusively to subjects such as hairstyling, cosmetics, seamstressing, and household management. </p><p>In the 1950s and &#8217;60s, the women’s prison focused on medical interventions and coercive therapies believed to “improve” women&#8217;s character and enforce “proper” morality. This included using <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2311.2006.00422.x">prisoners as test subjects</a> for experiments with LSD and other clinical trials. Later, in the context of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1970s and &#8217;80s, reformers used the notion that women are “different but equal” to argue for a “women-centered” prison framework rooted in an “ethics of care.” The state couched its violent carceral policies in a language of empowerment, choice, and healing that made prisoners responsible for both their “mistakes” and their own reformation.</p><p>It’s in this context that, in 1990, a Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) task force published &#8220;<a href="https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/csc-scc/migration/002/002/092/002002-0001-en.pdf">Creating Choices</a>: The Report of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women,&#8221; which advocated for the closure of P4W and the establishment of five regional women’s prisons and an Indigenous healing lodge. According to the report, the new institutions were to promote “culturally sensitive” and “supportive” punishment aimed at empowering women to make “meaningful choices” in service of healing and dignity. Informed by the voices of Indigenous prisoners committed to their peers and critical of empty reform, the report was monumental in changing the terms of women&#8217;s incarceration in Canada. As P4WMC Advisory Board member Dr. Isabel Scheuneman Scott reminds me, “Creating Choices” was rooted in Indigenous knowledge and experience, and it demanded systemic change. Yet CSC’s implementation of the report ultimately <a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/files/anidealprison.pdf">facilitated the expansion</a> of the prison system.<br /><br /></p><p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-8224 size-full" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/flowers.jpeg" alt="Flowers laid on the future site of the P4W memorial garden, in honour of women lost inside." width="723" height="542" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/flowers.jpeg 723w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/flowers-300x225.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 723px) 100vw, 723px" /></p><h2><br />The Woman Prisoner </h2><p>The penal system <a href="https://xtramagazine.com/power/politics/canada-prison-system-transphobic-261827">relies on a strict gender binary</a>. Within women&#8217;s prisons, perceived masculinity is <a href="https://prisonpolitics.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/girshick_masculinewomen.pdf">often viewed as non-compliance linked to aggression</a>, leading to the policing of transmasculine prisoners&#8217; gender expression. Even the category of &#8220;women&#8221; itself has historically excluded and continues to exclude Black and Indigenous women. As the writer and scholar <a href="https://canadianwomen.org/blog/robyn-maynard/">Robin Maynard</a> notes, Black women are often criminalized rather than protected under patriarchal notions of vulnerability, while Indigenous women are punished for deviating from colonial gender norms. Racialized prisoners experience <a href="https://oci-bec.gc.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/annrpt20202021-eng.pdf">harsher treatment, longer sentences, and less access to family</a> than their white counterparts.</p><p>Gender discipline in women’s prisons often occurs through what I call “playing house.” Prisoners&#8217; quarters are made to resemble the private, domestic home, and prisoners are compelled to perform what the prison system defines as <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/correctional-service/corporate/library/research/report/214-full-report.html">“pro-social” behaviors</a>, including punctuality and cooperation. CSC has historically called these processes “social transformation experiments.” This formula is employed by women’s prisons to claim they are improving living conditions and providing access to the normalities of the outside world, all the while further regulating prisoners’ time, bodies, and relationships.</p><p>In her book <i>Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society&#8217;s Crimes</i>, former prisoner and Prison for Women Memorial Collective member Ann Hansen recalls the opening of McNeill House, the first women&#8217;s minimum security prison in Canada, in 1990. McNeill House was established in response to the <a href="https://johnhoward.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1977-HV-9507-C33-1977-MacGuigan.pdf">1977 MacGuigan report</a>, which criticized the Prison for Women as &#8220;unfit for bears, much less women.&#8221; Ann describes McNeill House – a 19th-century limestone mansion in Kingston, originally built for the Prison for Women warden – as being furnished with white shag carpet, white leather furniture, and hundred-dollar tropical plants. An extension of P4W, the house held 11 women under the pretence that, as Ann recalls it, a “six-month stint in a mansion-like setting would produce such a strong craving to maintain upper-class standards that we would somehow magically figure out how to acquire them.” But without any material or structural support, Ann goes on to say, “the only way any of us were going to live in a mansion would be by becoming high-class hookers, or through organized crime.” What did it matter that you ate your meals with a solid oak dining set in a lavish dining room, Ann asks, when you could be arbitrarily sent back across the street for “smoking a joint” or “talking back to a guard sitting on a leather couch in a white room with a white shag carpet?” As Ann reminded me, “No matter how you look at it…there&#8217;s another group of people who have all the power – in every way, shape, and form – over your life.”</p><p>Both Ann and fellow P4WMC member Rachel Fayter did time at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario, initially built as a cul-de-sac of bungalows along a tree-lined boulevard. Built in 1997, GVI was said to counter the harsh conditions of P4W, with its white picket fences rather than barbed wire. Prisoners there had their own private rooms and shared living spaces without guards; they were collectively responsible for the functions of the household. As one prisoner told CTV Kitchener a few years after the prison opened, “<a href="https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/features/inside-gvi/life-in-prison-behind-the-barbed-wire-at-grand-valley-institution-1.3601895">There’s nothing to do here [except] wash floors and cut grass.”</a> Ann tells me: &#8220;The houses are a facade… They still control you – it&#8217;s like oh, you’re the cook, but there is still a scarcity of food, you know?” </p><p>Reforms such as the McNeill house and GVI’s bungalows required prisoners to perform homemaking, and yet the state&#8217;s policies and practices prevented prisoners’ actual work of keeping each other alive – of creating networks of kinship. As Rachel puts it, “It’s so messed up… CSC claims they want to make pro-social citizens and have people get out that will be positive contributors to society. But then, at the same time, they&#8217;re saying you can&#8217;t help people or share with one another.” In addition to prison officials constantly breaking up prisoner couples, which Ann experienced and witnessed, at GVI there was an ever-present possibility of being sent to maximum security for even just entering another person&#8217;s bungalow or, as Rachel recalls, sharing toothpaste. This, she pointed out, is punishable under CSC’s “<a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/correctional-service/corporate/acts-regulations-policy/commissioners-directives/566-12.html">no sharing policy</a>,” which enforces disciplinary charges for breaking the rule. Rachel witnessed someone sent to segregation for helping an elderly disabled prisoner in her forced relocation to another cell. During our conversation, Rachel lamented that you couldn&#8217;t even do the life-saving work of checking in on each other: “You see your friend sitting on their porch, or maybe they&#8217;re hiding in their house, and you don&#8217;t know how they&#8217;re feeling. Like, there&#8217;s lots of people who die by suicide in prison because they&#8217;re so depressed. So you&#8217;re worried about your friends, right? And you&#8217;re not allowed to go check on them. You&#8217;re not allowed to see how they&#8217;re doing. You&#8217;ll go to segregation.”</p><p>As Prison for Women Memorial Collective members reminded me throughout our conversations, the largest threat to the prison as an institution is prisoner solidarity. And while the prison continues to adapt, to disrupt relationship-building and collective organizing, prisoners continue to resist.<br /><br /></p><h2><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-8225 size-full" src="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Group-shot.jpeg" alt="Prisoners' Justice Day (2024) in Kingston on the grounds of the Prison For Women. Four women stand together in solidarity with each other, outside on a grassy lawn, smiling at the camera." width="767" height="1023" srcset="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Group-shot.jpeg 767w, https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Group-shot-225x300.jpeg 225w" sizes="(max-width: 767px) 100vw, 767px" /></h2><h2><br />Gendered tactics of resistance </h2><p>Prisoners have always resisted their conditions of confinement through diverse and emergent tactics of revolt. The riot and the strike are used in women&#8217;s prisons just as they are men’s. In 1978, 98% of prisoners in P4W allegedly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2H9zKNatX4">participated in a hunger strike and work stoppage on Prisoners’ Justice Day</a>. In 1994, six P4W prisoners, <a href="https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/transcript-fighting-for-justice-in-federal-womens-prisons/">resisting the violence of segregation</a>, fought and incapacitated multiple correctional officers, resulting in a violent assault from the all-male, all-white Institutional Emergency Response Team (IERT). When the video of the goon squad assault aired on the CBC’s investigative journalism program <i>The Fifth Estate</i>, P4W became more visible to the public eye, inspiring outside protests that hastened its closure. Starting in 1972, the prisoner-produced newsletter <a href="https://penalpress.com/en/name/tightwire/"><i>Tightwire</i></a> offered a platform for P4W prisoners to share art, ideas, and experiences, and to educate readers about life in the prison. From 1991 to 1996, the prisoner-produced, -filmed, and -edited TV show <em><a href="https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/filmmaker-looks-for-lost-tapes-from-inmate-produced-contact-tv-show">Contact</a></em> aired on public TV, including a live call-in segment in which P4W prisoners shared their experiences and engaged with the public in real time. </p><p>Yet conversations with P4W Memorial Collective members made clear to me that we must pay attention not only to those all-gender forms of prisoner defiance, but also to how the regulation of womanhood and motherhood has fundamentally shaped the forms of resistance required in women’s prisons. 75% of incarcerated women are <a href="https://gladue.usask.ca/sites/gladue1.usask.ca/files/gladue//resource405-2d31042a.pdf">sole caregivers to children under the age of 18</a> at the time of their arrest. Women are often incarcerated far from their children and their home and yet are deemed unfit mothers, punished for “abandoning” their children. As Dr. Scheuneman Scott reminded me, this is <a href="https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/aps/index.php/aps/article/view/29333/21396">particularly true for Indigenous women</a>, who not only are over-represented in the prison system, but also spend longer in prison than non-Indigenous women and face harsher punishment in maximum security institutions farther away from their homes. Indigenous women are also more likely to have their children funnelled into the foster care system. Punishing women for being unfit mothers while withholding access to children and spaces of parenting has become a core feature of women’s incarceration in Canada.</p><p>This dynamic means prisoner resistance is often high-stakes, as Ann, Rachel, and Dr. Scheuneman Scott underscored. Prison officials’ ability to take away incarcerated women’s access to their families, Ann says, “is the main reason why there is not a lot of resistance… The power of the state to punish you if you resist in prison is so huge.” This feeling was echoed by Rachel: “You break a minor rule and they just refuse. No, you are not allowed any visits for the next month. No, you can’t go to the family day social. It’s just really horrible.” </p><p>The first woman prisoner in Canada to be classified as a terrorist, Ann was imprisoned due to her involvement with the anarchist group Direct Action. Even though Ann was incarcerated explicitly for her radical political beliefs and actions, she recognized the realities of trying to organize inside. “People don’t come into prison, no matter how political they are or what they did in the street, and go in and organize… [To organize in those conditions,] someone&#8217;s gotta have a lot of respect from a lot of people, and it&#8217;s gotta be something they all want. People are practical about resistance, especially given the punishment that would no doubt follow.” While Ann held on to her political convictions, she lamented that &#8220;after a few years in prison, you start to see so much injustice around you that it creates a sense of inertia.”</p><p>Given the particularities of incarceration at P4W, it is no surprise that family separation was often a key concern driving the organizing that did happen. Throughout our conversation, Ann often mentioned <a href="https://www.academia.edu/80179647/A_Tribute_to_Gayle_Horii?sm=b">Gayle Horii</a>, a stockbroker locked up for white-collar crime. “[Gayle] became an incredible activist,” Ann told me. “She could have been a member of any guerilla group on the international stage, you know, IRA, FLN, you name it.” Ann spoke about how Gayle, who had become the chairperson of the inmate committee, fought relentlessly for her comrades, despite the near-futility of official processes for seeking redress for wrongs done by the prison system. So when Gayle was denied a transfer to Vancouver to be closer to her husband as he underwent life-threatening surgery, many other prisoners joined her in a hunger strike. Ann remembered that segregation cells were double- and triple-bunked with people refusing to eat unless Gayle was granted her transfer. Eventually, after she stopped drinking water, she was. </p><p>As with Gayle’s struggle, it is in prisoners&#8217; willingness to share risks that resistance takes shape in a place of profound deprivation. An anecdote from Ann captures how this sharing and redistributing of risk looked in practice: “Everybody&#8217;s smuggling up a little bit of sugar, which could also be used to make a brew, or they bring up an apple, or an orange, or whatever…or you may be on your way up from the cafeteria, and there&#8217;s the guards, and they&#8217;re frisking everybody. And your friend, who for some reason doesn&#8217;t get frisked very often, says, ‘I&#8217;ll take that sugar today,’ and then they get caught, and they don&#8217;t rat it out.” All three P4WMC members I spoke to made it clear that risk is never equal for all prisoners. Black and Indigenous people are <a href="https://oci-bec.gc.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/annrpt20202021-eng.pdf">2.5 times more likely to experience excess force</a> while in prison, and spend far more time not only behind bars but <a href="http://www.oci-bec.gc.ca/cnt/rpt/annrpt/annrpt20202021-eng.aspx">in solitary confinement</a>. Of the seven suicide deaths at P4W between 1981 and 1991, six were Indigenous women. </p><p>It was to confront such realities that Indigenous prisoners created the <a href="https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2934&amp;context=etd&amp;ref=smaac.org">Native Sisterhood</a> organization inside P4W in the early 1970s. Composed of Indigenous peoples from all over Turtle Island, the Native Sisterhood created space for various Indigenous spiritual practices, cultural identities, and kinship models to grapple with the compounding losses of family, land, culture, and Indigenous governance. Recognizing the power of collectivity and shared risk, the Sisterhood welcomed politically aligned non-Indigenous prisoners into its circle. Until the closure of P4W, the Native Sisterhood continued to provide access to cultural and spiritual spaces for Indigenous prisoners there – responding to the crises of colonial dislocation and loss, advocating for more and better, and documenting and spreading stories of women’s lives and resistance inside. While the network of new federal prisons separated the Sisterhood – a longstanding colonial tactic of incapacitation – the closure of P4W nevertheless spread the seeds of resistance and Indigenous prisoner organizing across the country.</p><p> </p><h2>Toward abolition</h2><p>The Prison for Women Memorial Collective has secured 1700 square feet to develop its memorial garden on the former site of the Prison for Women. Protected by the city and funded by a grant, the garden will remain even if the land is sold. For the collective, the garden is an act of remembering, a refusal to forget the women who lived and died inside P4W. For abolitionists, the garden serves as a reminder of the stakes of our work &#8211; so long as prisons exist, there will be people who don’t make it out alive. (You can learn more about the memorial garden on the<a href="https://p4wmemorialcollective.com/memorial-garden/"> P4WMC website</a>.)</p><p>As the members of P4WMC emphasized throughout our conversations, the history of the Prison for Women also serves as an important reminder that even hard-fought reforms cannot adequately address the foundational violences of the prison. “Like the proverbial snake,” Ann says, “[the prison] can periodically shed its skin to reveal itself shinier, but as an otherwise identical version of its original self.” Yet this doesn’t mean prisoners and those in solidarity with them should stop pushing for less violence in prison. As Ann also remarked to me, “How are you going to say to someone who has been in segregation for years, let’s say Ashley Smith who died in the hole…that we are not going to get rid of segregation because it is reform? How devastating would it be to hear that people think we have to get rid of the entire prison system and capitalism or nothing at all.” Instead, Ann offers a frame she learned from studying the Black Panther Party: harm reduction and “survival pending revolution.” </p><p>As abolitionists, we should seek to understand the tactical repertoire of resistance that has long existed inside women’s prisons, especially when such tactics challenge our preconceived notions of what militancy should look like, taking our lead from prisoners organizing for their own liberation. The history of P4W allows us to track the predictable, patterned ways that prisons use reform to further entrench punishment. It helps us understand how “reform” can be a strategy for upholding white supremacist, colonial notions of womanhood. It charts a lineage of prisoner resistance inside Canada’s women’s prisons and provides important lessons for abolitionist organizing today. And, vitally, it calls on us to remember the women who struggled against the violence of the prison and lost their lives in the process.</p>						</div>
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							<p>The Prison for Women Memorial Collective is a group of former prisoners who are creating a memorial garden to honour those who died at P4W and those who continue to live and die in prisons, jails, and detention centers across Canada.</p><p>Kendra Cowley (she/her) is an abolitionist and public librarian living in Tkaronto but forever from the prairies.</p><p>Embedded photos by Rachel Fayter and courtesy of the Prison for Women Memorial Collective.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/taking-our-lead-from-women-prisoners/">Taking Our Lead from Women Prisoners</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Patience in Patchwork</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-patience-in-patchwork/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-patience-in-patchwork</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 27 Jul 2024 17:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Interventions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cleopatria Peterson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mayworks Festival]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Quilting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Quilts]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8177</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Cleopatria Peterson on artmaking as both a tool and a symbol of resistance.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-patience-in-patchwork/">The Patience in Patchwork</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/three-assorted-color-quilts-z4x9ITBe040" target="_blank">Photo: Raúl Cacho Oses/Unsplash</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">7. 27. 2024</h3><h1>The Patience in Patchwork</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>Cleopatria Peterson</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><br />I have never created a quilt, but I used to work in a fabric store where sometimes helping folks create a quilt was part of my job. I enjoyed this work, the problem solving and pattern matching. In this way and others, I have often had a proximity to sewing without being good at it. I can sew a seam, but not well. When we mention a quilt, you might have your own personal touchstone, a quilt you think of. I think of the quilt that used to be on my bed in my childhood home. It was thrifted, and its makers had gotten lazy with the topstitching. My mother just recently threw it out, as it was falling apart; it had many holes that you could slip your fingers in, to feel the softness of the batting, which I found comforting. I slept under it many times. When I think of quilting as a practice, I think of my friends who quilt for newborns and newlyweds, the gifts they work upon to bestow on others. Creating a quilt takes time, and it can be quite a solitary endeavour, but there are times when community comes together in a quilt’s creation too.</p><p>I had the privilege of designing the festival poster for this year’s <a href="https://mayworks.ca/">Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts</a>, an annual arts and labour festival in Toronto, and out of all the poster concepts initially considered, the one that featured a quilt was the one I felt most connected to. I approached the poster design as someone who appreciates the craft of quilting and its rich, diverse history – a history that is deeply rooted in emancipatory labour practices. One example is the Freedom Quilting Bee, a Black women’s quiltmaking cooperative <a href="https://www.geesbend.org/history-of-gees-bend">founded in the American South in 1966</a>, providing jobs and leadership opportunities in its community. Some quilt designs themselves make use of motifs that depict acts or symbols of labour: the carpenter’s wheel, the monkey wrench, or the mariner’s star, to name a few. </p><p>I wanted to connect symbols of art and labour, activism and community – not contrasting those ideas, but illustrating the fundamental truth that they and we are all connected. Our struggles, our labour, our health, our love are all connected, no matter our differences. In fact, those differences are often where our strength lies; they can provide openings for us to strengthen our bonds as people, because each person is like their own quilt square. The contrasts in where we come from, our identities, and our beliefs allow us to learn new patterns for existing in the world. Such understandings help us build united communities where our common (and distinct) needs are understood and we work, in our different ways, towards meeting them. Like all things, that takes time and effort, but a labour of love is often worth the effort. </p><p>Quilts and quilting are prominent in many places and cultures, and although their fabrics, patterns, and meanings vary, the fundamentals of their uses and their construction are often similar. Whether used primarily as a blanket or an activist statement, whether created as a solo endeavour or with others, there is always a recognizable, consistent form of labour embedded in the object by the process of its fabrication. You can trace a quilt’s materials from the earth that grew them to the hands that processed, dyed, and spun them; the courier who shipped the bolt, the attendant that cut the metre (this used to be me), the seamstress that sewed each piece into a whole. If you look close enough, you can always see the many hands involved in a quilt’s creation. You can see the labour that went into it, the contributions of land, machine, and person.</p><p>Textiles are often understood to be women&#8217;s work – the work of the stitch by the fire as the men laboured elsewhere. Quilts historically have been a staple of poor and rural areas, and often those who live in those places are folks of colour, relegated to the outskirts as they perform labour that is often hard on a body. In such places and others, a quilt becomes something helpful and comforting from something little: from the scraps left over from new garments or items that have begun to wear but are fit to be repurposed. It is a slow creation, one that can&#8217;t be rushed, that takes time and planning. A quilt can remind us to take our time, a grace most of us are never afforded, instead sped up and ground down by capital at work. We should heed this reminder, and build power to resist the social forces that deny us such patience and intention in our labour. That patience, in the spaces where we can rest and breathe, lets us see the real value of what we have created. We can see the spots that might need a second stitch to strengthen them, a gap where new fabric could find its place. A quilt can teach us that together, with patience, we can build a durable patchwork through our communal labour. It can teach us that there is often a common thread to bind us together.</p>						</div>
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							<p><span class="LineBreakBlob BlobObject DragDrop SCXW155674828 BCX8"><span id="m_-9033545836241626226gmail-docs-internal-guid-d2df5d62-7fff-e659-8802-e619332dbcd5">Cleopatria Peterson (they/them)</span> is a multi-disciplinary artist that explores the intersectionality of their identities as a black, non-binary transgender crip artist through the mediums of narrative, printmaking, illustration and education. They are a member of the Crip Arts Collective and have had their work shown at The Canadian Textile Museum, and are one of the co-founders of Old Growth Press.</span></p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/life-making-or-death-making/"     class="crp_link post-3623"><span class="crp_title">Life-making or Death-making?</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Susan Ferguson on how the pandemic has laid bare the social reproduction labour that keeps capitalism churning, the fundamental violence of the capitalist system itself, and emerging possibilities for fighting back.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-patience-in-patchwork/">The Patience in Patchwork</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Fighting The Latest Forms of Colonial Extraction in Manitoba</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/fighting-the-latest-forms-of-colonial-extraction-in-manitoba/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fighting-the-latest-forms-of-colonial-extraction-in-manitoba</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Critical minerals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Manitoba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Owen Schalk]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8130</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Owen Schalk on Manitoba's all-out push to mine the minerals used in "green" technologies, and local resistance to it.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/fighting-the-latest-forms-of-colonial-extraction-in-manitoba/">Fighting The Latest Forms of Colonial Extraction in Manitoba</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/a-mountain-with-a-road-going-through-it-7leVPTanfTw" target="_blank">Photo: Pavel Neznanov/Unsplash</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">7. 12. 2024</h3><h1>Fighting The Latest Forms of Colonial Extraction in Manitoba</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>Owen Schalk</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />In the sprawling Manitoba district of </span><a href="https://www.electionsmanitoba.ca/downloads/Profile/Pdf/Keewatinook.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keewatinook</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – population 18,000, 98 percent of whom are Indigenous – a local resistance movement is challenging the provincial government’s push to extract “critical minerals”: minerals essential to the production of ostensibly green, clean technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels. Centred around </span><a href="https://collection.nfb.ca/film/lake-winnipeg-project-camp-morningstar"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a sacred camp called Camp Morningstar</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, this movement’s experience demonstrates the importance of building connections between urban and rural struggles, deepening solidarity between Indigenous people and settlers, and connecting local resistance to global geopolitical issues.</span></p><p> </p><h2>A movement against environmental racism</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Camp Morningstar was formed by members of the Hollow Water First Nation in February 2019 to resist a proposed silica sand mine, owned by the Alberta-based mining company Canadian Premium Sand (CPS). Camp members assert that the community was never properly consulted about the project, environmental concerns have not been adequately addressed – especially fears about the airborne spread of silica dust, which can cause the serious lung disease silicosis when inhaled – and treaty rights have been violated, including through the destruction of a trapline near the proposed mine site.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The CPS project, also known as Wanipigow Sand (Wanipigow is the Ojibwe word for Hollow Water), has been controversial since its inception. Camp members told me that Hollow Water&#8217;s chief and council approved the mine without the free, prior, and informed consent of community members, and that when consultation did occur, it was a mere “</span><a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/delay-for-sand-mine-project-in-manitoba-has-some-celebrating/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">show and tell</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” by the company. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Wanipigow Sand project has taken several forms. First it was a frac sand project; now it’s a glass sand mine. First the company promised more than 100 jobs to community members; now the sand processing plant has been moved two hours south to the city of Selkirk, taking those jobs with it. To Camp Morningstar, any possible benefits from the mine have been continuously diluted, while the environmental risks – deforestation, wild habitat destruction, air quality degradation – remain.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Camp Morningstar is not the only organization in Manitoba that has resisted silica sand mining. In the southern rural municipality of Springfield, the proposed Sio Silica mine provoked worries about soil damage and air quality. Sio also planned to extract the sand from groundwater, raising fears of water drawdown and contamination. A community group called </span><a href="https://ourlineinthesandmanitoba.ca/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our Line in the Sand Manitoba</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (OLS) formed to oppose the project, and when the group’s letters and phone calls to public officials went unanswered, it staged a protest at the site of a CanWhite Sand Corps (later Sio) mine.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In February 2024, the province’s NDP government announced it was “</span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sio-silica-sand-mining-project-southeastern-manitoba-1.7117246"><span style="font-weight: 400;">saying no to Sio</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” cancelling the southern Manitoba project. Specifically, the government cited the safety risks inherent in Sio’s unproven method of sand extraction from groundwater. Resistance from frontline communities, backed by provincial organizations such as the environmental group </span><a href="https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/manitoba"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wilderness Committee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.mbenergyjustice.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, likely played a role in the project’s cancellation.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The same month, Premier Kinew said “yes to CPS” – Canadian Premium Sand – effectively greenlighting the Wanipigow Sand project. Manitoba government officials have lavished praise on the project, with Premier Wab Kinew </span><a href="https://www.myselkirk.ca/blog/2024/02/15/yestocps/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">affirming</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that the mine is “part of our government’s critical mineral strategy and will bring a significant economic benefit to Manitoba while growing our low-carbon economy.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Camp Morningstar disagrees. Members describe the government’s decision to reject Sio Silica in southern Manitoba, while approving CPS in northern Manitoba, as environmental racism – a racist willingness to take risks with the health of Indigenous populations. As Kateri Philips, a camp member and teacher at Hollow Water First Nation, told me: “The roots of this go back way before Wab and his government. The policies that have been in place for years were used against us.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>Continuities of capitalist extraction</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The Costco of critical minerals”: that’s how former Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/province-unveils-critical-mineral-strategy-1.6917339"><span style="font-weight: 400;">described</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the province at the unveiling of her government’s critical minerals strategy in July 2023. Of the 31 minerals identified in the </span><a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/campaign/critical-minerals-in-canada/canadian-critical-minerals-strategy.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">federal government’s critical minerals strategy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Manitoba has 29. The province’s goal is to get more mines into production by funding exploration – especially in “</span><a href="https://electricautonomy.ca/policy-regulations/2023-08-09/manitoba-critical-minerals-strategy/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">remote or under-explored regions</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” – reducing timelines to approve mines, and evaluating the possibility of switching to a digital claim-staking system similar to Ontario’s </span><a href="https://www.ontario.ca/page/mining-lands-administration-system"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mining Lands Administration System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (MLAS).</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">NDP premier Wab Kinew has continued the Conservatives’ mineral rush, attending the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference in Toronto in March 2024 and </span><a href="https://mbchamber.mb.ca/2024/03/11/manitobas-commitment-to-mineral-development-showcased-at-pdac-2024-conference/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pitching</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Manitoba’s “appeal as an investment destination.” Mining exploration is expanding under his premiership: there are currently four active mines in Manitoba, but </span><a href="https://www.gov.mb.ca/iem/industry/mb_min_exp_geoscience_2024_2025.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">68 projects</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> with mineral resource estimates or exploration permits.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The government’s extractive fervor has provoked resistance at mining and exploration sites across Manitoba, not just at Camp Morningstar. Other projects – the Tanco mine at Bernic Lake, mining in or near the Nopiming and Grass River Provincial Parks – have spurred opposition as well. These mines contain some of the Manitoba government’s most sought-after minerals: lithium, copper, nickel, and silica, all of which are used for EV battery production.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Tanco mine on the northwest shore of Bernic Lake, owned by Chinese company Sinomine, produces lithium. Sinomine is also interested in extracting cesium, a rare critical mineral used in drilling fluid, from the pillars of an underground mine at the site. The extraction process would require partly draining Bernic Lake to reach the cesium from the surface, with a goal of creating the conditions for open-pit mining. Sagkeeng First Nation, the Manitoba Métis Federation, and Wilderness Committee have all expressed concerns about the ecological impacts of the lake-draining proposal.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The press, however, is more concerned that the mine is Chinese-owned. This fact blares from the headlines when the mine is covered by the </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sinomine-tanco-expansion-manitoba-1.6897808"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CBC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/china-tensions-chinese-owned-lithium-mine-manitoba"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Financial Post</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, for example. The CBC quotes Christopher Ecclestone, a mining strategist at Hallgarten &amp; Company in London, UK: “Does Canada or the U.S. really want that cesium owned by a foreign outfit?” Readers of such media may be left with the impression that one of the biggest problems in Canadian mining is not the risks posed to human and non-human health or the legislative bias toward extraction, but Chinese ownership of a small number of projects. Yet, in Manitoba and nationwide, many mining projects that pose profound social and ecological dangers are owned by Canadians.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mineral exploration in provincial parks has </span><a href="https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/news/caribou-habitat-disrupted-mining-provincial-park-funded-government"><span style="font-weight: 400;">increased under the NDP</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from 659 claims to 681. There is exploration ongoing near Nopiming Provincial Park, the most endangered boreal caribou range in the province; the bulldozing of forest at that provincial park has been reported as recently as </span><a href="https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/news/bulldozing-nopiming-provincial-park-continues"><span style="font-weight: 400;">April 2024</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. On top of this, Toronto-based mining company NiCan Limited is exploring inside Grass River Provincial Park, another caribou range. The Kinew government is </span><a href="https://thenarwhal.ca/manitoba-mining-claim-caribou-habitat/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">directly funding NiCan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: at PDAC 2024, Manitoba revealed that it had granted $300,000 to NiCan through the Mineral Development Fund. “The most sickening aspect is that the Manitoba government is using our public money to destroy part of this provincial park, where caribou live year round, for corporate profit,” </span><a href="https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/news/caribou-habitat-disrupted-mining-provincial-park-funded-government"><span style="font-weight: 400;">said</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Eric Reder, a campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For the most part, critical minerals strategies offer no detailed plan for how mining projects can move Canada away from climate-damaging energy sources. As Reder </span><a href="https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/news/critical-action-mineral-extraction"><span style="font-weight: 400;">writes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, “A critical minerals strategy climate document must directly lead us away from fossil fuels. Otherwise, it’s simply a sales brochure for the mining industry or a government hand-out of public money to corporations in a dirty and destructive industry.”</span></p><p> </p><h2>The local frontlines of global power politics</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Canadian leaders claim that critical minerals projects will create good-paying jobs while helping Canada transition away from fossil fuels. They neglect to mention that those mining projects frequently harm ecologies, sidestep local consultation, and undermine treaty rights while filling the pockets of powerful mining executives.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">They also typically fail to acknowledge that Canada’s critical minerals rush is occurring in the context of </span><a href="https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/bidens-policies-are-revitalizing-chip-manufacturing-in-america/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">US President Joe Biden’s efforts to onshore high-tech production</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, partly as a hedge against China’s manufacturing might. The Chinese company Sinomine may own one mine in Manitoba, but the province’s minerals strategy is part of a larger project that aims to decrease North American reliance on China by integrating more closely with US mining and technological production.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, silica mined from Wanipigow Sand will be trucked two hours south to Selkirk, turned into solar panel glass, then shipped to a solar panel production facility in the US state of Georgia. The government of Manitoba has </span><a href="https://www.cpecn.com/news/manitoba-to-create-270-critical-mineral-jobs-with-extraction-project-and-solar-glass-manufacturing-facility"><span style="font-weight: 400;">promoted</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Wanipigow Sand as a successful example of onshoring: “The project…will appeal directly to countries like the United States that are looking to onshore manufacturing inputs.” Meanwhile, the US military is </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-dpa-money-mines-canada-analysis-1.7214664"><span style="font-weight: 400;">directly funding mines</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Canada to reduce American dependence on China. And as the US and Canada integrate their mineral industries to counter China, the North American allies are also threatening China militarily, including by </span><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67282107"><span style="font-weight: 400;">arming Taiwan to the teeth</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canada-taiwan-strait-ownership-1.6961816"><span style="font-weight: 400;">sailing warships through the South China Sea</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While Manitoba mines may seem remote from warships in the Taiwan Strait, they are in fact interwoven by the economic and military relationship that binds the Canadian and US capitalist classes together in an imperialist alliance. Solar panels made with silica from northern Manitoba are not manufactured only or primarily for the sake of good-paying jobs or a sustainable transition away from fossil fuels, but also as part of the US military-economic challenge against its main global competitor. In Manitoba, anti-mining groups must work to connect the local and global, linking the need for decolonization at home to the struggle against imperialist policies abroad.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>Lessons from the front lines</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strategically, there is much to learn from struggles against critical minerals extraction in Manitoba. Protests and direct action bore fruit in the fight against Sio Silica, but not against the Canadian Premium Sand silica sand mine. Why? Camp Morningstar asserts it is because their struggle is remote from the majority population – they are three hours north of Winnipeg – resulting in limited awareness and support from the provincial capital. In the struggle against Manitoba’s current model of resource extraction, resistance groups must forge north-south and rural-urban connections. Any just future model of mineral exploration will require </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Indigenous sovereignty, settler solidarity with Indigenous struggles, and Indigenous nations’ substantive free, prior, and informed consent – not superficial consultations that are so often instrumentalized to speed up extraction. These struggles must not rely on our current political parties, as even the ostensibly progressive provincial NDP is enthusiastically continuing the extractive colonial policies of previous governments.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manitoba’s mining model is colonialist, imperialist, and geared toward the desires of industry rather than the needs of mining-affected communities – and the province’s critical minerals rush is just beginning. As it grows, so must our capacity for organization, direct action, educational initiatives, and inter-struggle cooperation, especially those forms of active solidarity that deepen trust and relationships between frontline Indigenous communities and settlers struggling alongside them.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">(Lorimer Books, 2023) and the co-author of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">with Yves Engler (Baraka Books, 2024). He contributes a weekly column to</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Canadian Dimension</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> magazine.</span></p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/fighting-the-latest-forms-of-colonial-extraction-in-manitoba/">Fighting The Latest Forms of Colonial Extraction in Manitoba</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Between Rupture and Settlement</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/between-rupture-and-settlement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=between-rupture-and-settlement</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jun 2024 13:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education workers]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Neil Braganza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing tactics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8089</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Neil Braganza on the recent CUPE 3903 strike at York University.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/between-rupture-and-settlement/">Between Rupture and Settlement</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/man-with-backpack-beside-a-books-9o8YdYGTT64" target="_blank">Photo: Redd F/Unsplash</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">6. 28. 2023</h3><h1>Between Rupture and Settlement</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><b>Neil Braganza</b><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> <br /></span>Living in a capitalist society involves being reminded repeatedly that our jobs and lives are precarious. Though our basic survival and well-being depend on finding a job and complying with the terms of employment, our workplaces are under constant pressure to cut costs, restructure, and get rid of as many of us as possible. The recent strike by approximately 2000 graduate student workers and 800 sessional instructors (contract faculty) in the union local CUPE 3903 at York University, which ran from February 26 to April 19, 2024, presents us with <a href="https://spectrejournal.com/last-fair-deal-in-the-country/">a case study of the contradictions that arise when a union confronts this predicament</a>. How should workers decide when to fight restructuring and defend their needs, and when to accommodate that restructuring?</p><p> </p><h2>The attack on sessional teaching and its resistance from below</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For two years leading up to the 2024 strike, union reps in CUPE 3903 unwisely participated in informal and off-the-record talks with the university on the subject of how to manage the precarity of sessional teaching. The union’s bargaining team emerged from these talks with what became known as a “job stability program” (JSP), a proposal for “stabilizing” sessional work in the context of the university’s effort to restructure the workplace so as to exclude long-service, aging employees, whose health benefits and pension plans represent growing costs. The union put its JSP forward as a bargaining demand on November 24, 2023. Less than a week later, the university responded with its own, more elaborate version of the program. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the union and university each claimed to oppose the other’s JSP, the mechanics of precarity at the core of </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rLDiJA2ZoOQHt1ZeiCuHDHwU7azdDnvuc8fcULiohS4/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">both versions</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of the </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DY81jI5sNCsVn094UsZIwyNj1H9E0kHelcBdh93vN_c/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">program</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> were the same. Those who taught the least would almost certainly lose their jobs, and those who taught the most would see their work drop by half or even two thirds. These job losses would help “stabilize” work around a low minimum for any sessionals who remained, while giving the university much broader discretion in hiring. In other words, both sides of the bargaining table proposed something that effectively eliminated the prospect of making a living as a sessional at York. (There were </span><a href="https://www.marxistworker.ca/articles/interview-neil-braganza-cupe-3903"><span style="font-weight: 400;">other problems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, too.)</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The union’s bargaining team did not make the restructuring (not to mention union-busting) character of the JSP explicit when they unveiled it at a general membership meeting on November 22, 2023. On the contrary, they presented the JSP as a progressive initiative that would improve the situation of members of equity groups (women and Indigenous, disabled, Black, racialized, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people). Job redistribution and restructuring mechanisms in the JSP were couched in progressive rhetoric that appealed to the union’s longstanding, praiseworthy efforts to make anti-oppression politics central to its organizing and mobilizing. It took rank-and-file members a few days before they realized, with some alarm, that they had voted to cut jobs and increase precarity across the entire spectrum of sessional instructors at York, including those from equity groups. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With this discovery, rank-and-file sessionals faced three intertwined strategic challenges. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">First, given that frustrations in the local were mounting over the university’s refusal to provide an overdue wage increase to help workers cope with the skyrocketing cost of living in Toronto (more on that later), a strike vote was only a few weeks away. That meant the union’s wage demands were part of a package that now also included a demand that would attack sessional jobs. Getting our union to drop the JSP would require mounting internal opposition to our own bargaining team just as strike mobilizations for wages were getting started. And that opposition would need to be explained to grad student comrades who were unfamiliar with many of the intricacies of sessional hiring and their restructuring. It was not surprising, then, that strike activists were often puzzled by the critique of the bargaining team from sessionals rising up against the JSP. Some interpreted that opposition as an anti-strike reaction by those with the relative privilege to weather the storm of the affordability crisis in Toronto. But even if sessionals were able to mount a successful challenge to the bargaining team in the face of these internal misunderstandings, the battle would need to be fought all over again at the bargaining table against an employer who insisted not only on implementing the JSP, but on denying wage demands, too.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The second strategic problem was that fighting the JSP would require difficult conversations with colleagues about how equity on paper may not be equity in practice. Most sessionals at first accepted their bargaining team’s framing of the JSP as a progressive equity initiative and were puzzled by opposition to it – with some even seeing that pushback as privilege asserting itself against efforts to address the systemic oppression of marginalized groups. Articulating a critique of the JSP required not only exposing how the program’s intricacies attacked all sessional instructors (including equity groups and the local’s most precarious members); it required, at first, tolerating being labelled a reactionary while doing so.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The third problem was the difficulty of explaining the workings of the JSP itself, which in the university’s version was a maze of over 100 clauses that interacted in indirect and complex ways with existing hiring practices. The union’s version was accompanied by </span><a href="https://3903.cupe.ca/2023/12/04/graduated-job-stability-program-faq/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">communications</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that, while helpful in their critique of sessional precarity at York, clouded issues by proposing a </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rLDiJA2ZoOQHt1ZeiCuHDHwU7azdDnvuc8fcULiohS4/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">cure that was worse than the disease</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The union’s initial account of the employer’s JSP </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/13bTCcfJFFMq0o2M9POgNPARFBm6Wefd1SzoiWgzM1Qk/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">downplayed and obscured</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> its </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DY81jI5sNCsVn094UsZIwyNj1H9E0kHelcBdh93vN_c/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">problems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, too. Contract negotiations are difficult to follow at the best of times, but even the most motivated and savvy radical’s eyes glazed over when conversations on the picket line turned to clarifying a position on the JSP.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only way to deal with these three interacting challenges was to engage in relentless critique of the JSP and its restructuring agenda, whether it was proposed by the university or the union itself. At first, that meant refusing to stand with the union’s consensus, raising hell against it, and thereby straining relations with some comrades. A few of us with a record of militancy in the local called for an immediate halt to strike mobilizations until the union dropped its JSP demand. We refused to fight for more precarity as though it were job security.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mounting resistance to the JSP from below meant focusing always on the impact the program would have on people’s lives. To repeat: under the JSP, those who teach the least almost certainly would have lost their jobs, those who teach the most would have had their work cut by as much as half or two thirds, and these job losses would have helped “stabilize” work around a low minimum for those who remain, while granting the university much broader discretion in hiring. Every layer of the membership that would have been adversely affected by the JSP includes members of equity groups. Rank-and-file sessionals worked to demystify the JSP at each opportunity provided by CUPE 3903’s very fortunate tradition of open bargaining – in weekly general members’ meetings, open bargaining meetings, on the picket line, over email and social media – and ultimately defeated it both in the union and at the bargaining table. Though the bargaining team listened to the membership, it did try to suspend open bargaining and move to confidential lawyer-to-lawyer talks, but rank-and-file members stopped them. Mobilizations from below also sparked conversations beyond the local that led another campus union – the York University Faculty Association – to join the campaign against the JSP and launch its own </span><a href="https://assets.nationbuilder.com/yufa/pages/1108/attachments/original/1711647346/Policy_grievance_-_JSP.pdf?1711647346"><span style="font-weight: 400;">grievance</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> against it.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Had CUPE 3903 reps focused on resisting restructuring rather than accommodating it, sessional mobilizations from below may have had a different character in the strike. Certainly more trust would have developed between rank-and-file sessionals and their bargaining team, freeing us to focus on demands to create more jobs by reducing class sizes and ensuring that new sections of courses are opened up when it makes pedagogical sense to do so. Such demands would benefit equity groups, as would programs to increase compensation for members facing systemic barriers that limit how much teaching they can take on. These and other measures could have been the basis of a </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYQBEDF4uUU"><span style="font-weight: 400;">coalition</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of interests across the membership, contributing to a campus-wide movement to prioritize teaching and learning over </span><a href="https://www.yufa.ca/audit_by_ontario_auditor_general_is_a_call_for_much_needed_change"><span style="font-weight: 400;">investments in new buildings,</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> reduce administrative bloat, and campaign for better funding from the provincial government. Those possibilities remain, but so do the pressures to contain them.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Wages and working-class power</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Like the resistance from below to the JSP,  the union’s struggle for higher wages illustrates the dilemma that workers face when deciding between defending their needs or accepting terms that accommodate the employer’s austerity agenda.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CUPE 3903’s initial bargaining position on wages addressed what members need in order to cope better with the intensifying affordability crisis in cities such as Toronto, where the rising costs of living have </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CYafLpMD29iILddGjWnvzL2WmMmdyMN9P0Xxw1NDulk/edit"><span style="font-weight: 400;">far outpaced any growth in our wages</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Public sector workers were also hit by Ontario’s Bill 124, which capped wages at 1% per year, 4% less than the average annual rate of inflation between September 2020 and September 2023. Because Bill 124 was subsequently </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/bill-124-appeal-court-ruling-ontario-1.7112291"><span style="font-weight: 400;">deemed unconstitutional</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the union’s initial demand was for a wage increase that would recover losses from inflation during the years Bill 124 was in effect and keep up with projected inflation over the course of the new contract. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In other words, members mobilized for a strike to restore and protect the purchasing power of their wages. This refusal to sacrifice basic human needs to the operation of business as usual created a rupture in capitalist social relations, generating ever-deeper motivations among strikers as they brought their issues forward to the university community and worked together to deal with the slew of practical and political problems that went into maintaining their struggle.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But launching a strike also triggers social and legal pressures to reach a settlement, return to work, and suture the rupture. Once the strike got underway, different calculations emerged on the wage question. Instead of thinking about demands in terms of how they would protect wages from being eroded by inflation, the question became how our wage demands compared to what other locals have received across the university sector. This shift in the frame of reference saw the union’s demands through the eyes of a state-mandated arbitrator looking at general trends across different workplaces and collective agreements – rather than at what people on strike are saying they need. Forced arbitration was a real threat, given the provincial government’s demonstrated willingness to legislate CUPE 3903 back to work, as it did in 2008 and 2018.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under the threat of state-imposed arbitration, not to mention the growing costs of the strike for the union and individual </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">members, tension grew between the desire to sustain the strike mobilization and the desire to reach a negotiated settlement at the bargaining table</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><a href="https://3903.cupe.ca/2024/04/19/april-19th-2024-ratification-vote-results-for-units-1-2-3/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the end</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, there was a pivot from rupture to settlement, and the union won wage increases that are sector-leading but far below the rate of inflation. In the context of open bargaining practiced by CUPE 3903, where there is a strong customary expectation that the bargaining team will consult and take direction from the membership, that pivot turned on how members collectively evaluated the extent of their leverage over the university.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On the one hand, members experienced their leverage in how during the strike most classes were suspended, campus activities were disrupted, and construction projects at the university’s established and new campuses were sometimes delayed. Meanwhile, the union’s message – shared over social media, at picket lines, through </span><a href="https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/york-eats-cake-while-union-members-go-hungry"><span style="font-weight: 400;">direct actions</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – poked holes in the university’s branding and promoted the legitimacy of our demands. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On the other hand, members identified limits to our leverage by pointing out that since 1999, York has successfully weathered the costs of strikes at a rate of one strike every 3-7 years. In 2018 it cancelled an entire term of summer teaching, which hurt sessionals who depend on that work but likely had little impact on university revenue, as it only delayed students’ access to courses they needed to graduate. With the growth of online teaching since the pandemic began, increased infrastructure and skills are now in place to allow people to cross picket lines virtually. Following the precedent it set in 2018, the York University Senate ruled that students in courses affected by the 2024 strike were permitted to finish with only 70% of the syllabus completed, which weakened the impact of disruptions. While strikes have caused drops in revenue from enrolment, those drops have been temporary. It was for all these reasons that, rather than meet the union’s demands, the university could afford to wait for back-to-work legislation to impose much lower terms of settlement through an arbitrator.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What was difficult about the strike was that, even though these two lines of reasoning about our leverage over the university pulled us in opposite directions, both were valid. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The question of power, alas, will remain undecided until working-class movements between and across workplaces rise up and resolve it. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Orienting ourselves to that possibility means talking about political motivations that run deeper than the narrow terms of labour-contract negotiations and collective bargaining. Those deeper sources are world-making yet ungovernable. They make strikes possible and sustainable. They spark the emotional and intellectual labour of a community that sees higher education as part of the struggle for social justice everywhere.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Neil Braganza is a sessional instructor currently teaching in the Humanities </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">department at York University in Toronto. He was recently elected to the position of Lead Steward (Unit 2) on the CUPE 3903 Executive Committee. He has written for </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spectre Journal</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Upping the Anti</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/between-rupture-and-settlement/">Between Rupture and Settlement</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Union Democracy and Quebec’s Historic Public Sector Strikes</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/union-democracy-and-quebecs-historic-public-sector-strikes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=union-democracy-and-quebecs-historic-public-sector-strikes</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:52:05 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Interventions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Common Front]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michèle Hehn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Quebec]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8060</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Michèle Hehn on the need to activate and organize rank-and-file members of Quebec’s educator unions in the wake of that province’s historic public sector strikes.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/union-democracy-and-quebecs-historic-public-sector-strikes/">Union Democracy and Quebec’s Historic Public Sector Strikes</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">6. 21. 2024</h3><h1>Union Democracy and Quebec’s Historic Public Sector Strikes</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /></span><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/michele-hehn/"><span style="color: #000000;">Michèle Hehn</span></a></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />From 2019 until my retirement in June 2023, I was a full-time secondary school teacher and member of the Alliance des professeures et professeurs de Montréal (AP), the union for Montreal teachers within the Fédération autonome des enseignants (FAE) – one of Quebec’s two union federations for teachers, representing those in Montreal, Quebec City, the Laurentians, and Gatineau. In Quebec’s 2023 public sector strikes </span><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/an-insiders-take-on-quebecs-common-front-strikes/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">previously analyzed in </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Midnight Sun</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">the AP/FAE played an important role. My experience as a union member afforded me a helpful perspective on two key elements of how the strike was built: the rank-and-file culture of the AP/FAE, both inside and outside the school setting, and the way the union leadership prepared the members for an unlimited strike. Both suggest the limits of attempting to build a strike without robust union democracy.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Democratic and less democratic tendencies within the union</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At both schools where I taught in Montreal, there was a lively and engaged union culture, in which a majority of teachers participated. Particularly early in the pandemic, the school union meetings were a vital hub for discussing questions around remote learning and staying abreast of the latest health protocols issued by the government. Then and later, issue after issue was raised at these lunchtime meetings, brought to a vote, and settled. The level of democracy never flagged, even during moments of heightened tension. This collective practice of democracy was serious and involved a high degree of mutual accountability. Indeed, my teacher comrades left no stone unturned in finding democratic solutions to workplace issues that just kept multiplying.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, outside of the school setting, the character of the union generally took on different aspects: a sweeping embrace of the membership on occasions when there was no opportunity for the members to influence union policy, and an anti-democratic tendency at times when the union’s course of action was to be decided. This distinction is sharply revealed by comparing the union’s biannual Colloque (Colloquium) in 2022 with the methods used in 2023 to prepare the rank and file for a strike.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The March 2022 Colloque was held at the Palais des Congrès, a vast conference center in Montreal. Schools were closed for two days to allow teachers to attend. The Colloque was a showcase for the Alliance des professeures et professeurs, its various committees, and private partners that included publishing houses and other sellers of pedagogical materials. Entering the cavernous Palais after slogging in the trenches of teaching for the better part of a year was like being ushered into a swanky hotel after camping in the rain. The booths and billboards were brightly coloured and dazzling. The opening plenary keynote speaker celebrated teachers’ courage and resourcefulness, while referring honestly to the immense challenges they face. But the gravity of those challenges was quickly deflected with humour, sending the signal that teachers should laugh through their tears. While the event was a pleasant, useful, informative exercise in solidarity, it offered the membership no substantive opportunities to influence union policy. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In comparison with the cruise ship-sized Palais, the puny hall at the Théâtre St-Denis where we voted in May 2023 to go on strike could hold only a small subset of the 9000 members of the Alliance des professeures et professeurs. Despite the engaged union culture at my school, only around 5% of the school’s teachers came to the after-hours meeting; only a few hundred members in total showed up to vote. Unlike during the Colloque, teachers received no time off work for this important decision. The union leadership announced that the earliest voting could begin was 8:30 PM, a time when many teachers are getting ready to go to bed. In fact, the voting took place even later. The union could’ve and should’ve offered an honest public reflection on the low turnout at the strike vote, but it failed to do so. Instead, the union’s newsletter boasted that “98% of members&#8230;voted for a strike” in a “packed&#8221; hall.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This experience shows not only the extent to which many union members are disconnected from their union as it exists beyond their individual schools, but also how the union leadership sometimes worsens this disengagement. And why does a union choose to dedicate significant resources to a pedagogical event such as the Colloque at the Palais des Congrès, but then lack a strategy for adequately funding its decision to go out on unlimited strike, as was the case in late 2023? Teachers who pay $1000 a year in union dues deserve answers to these questions.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Opportunities missed and seized</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The 2023 Quebec public sector strikes were shaped by forces beyond those dynamics between unions’ rank and file and their leadership, of course. While elected officials from both the Parti Québécois (PQ) and Québec Solidaire (QS) parties claimed to support the strike wholeheartedly and could have played a cohering role, they limited their engagement to attendance at the marches organized by the unions. QS’s biannual Congrès in Gatineau in November 2023 was attended by nearly 700 party activists: the opening plenary would have been a perfect place to invite striking public sector workers to talk about their historic strike. Instead, the three-day event passed without any serious reference to the epic labour struggle going on outside its walls. The local QS elected deputy who visited my school shortly before the strike vote bypassed the union completely, opting instead to be introduced to the school’s teachers by the school administration.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the leadership of the striking unions, the Parti Québécois, and Québec Solidaire remained isolated in their professional silos, the small, recently formed group Alliance Ouvrière (AO) did its best to fill the vacuum. Made up of volunteer militant rank-and-file union members, AO held several meetings in Montreal outside of normal work hours, to allow the rank and file to share information about their respective unions and strategize about what to do if the government were to enact back-to-work legislation. At the last such meeting before the strike, attendees identified the elimination of mandatory overtime as a top priority, to be resisted whether it involved one’s own collective agreement or not. In this way, AO empowered union members to define their own policy agenda. The unions themselves could also have hosted such discussions, but largely chose not to.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Quebec public sector strikes won important gains while </span><a href="https://www.journaldequebec.com/2023/12/18/negos-du-secteur-public--56-des-quebecois-appuient-le-recours-a-la-greve-par-les-enseignants"><span style="font-weight: 400;">keeping the public on the workers’ side</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, demonstrating how unions are still the most powerful tool the working class has for fighting government austerity. But to strike effectively, workers need strike funds and union democracy. Alliance Ouvrière’s efforts to organize and activate rank-and-file members is a courageous, promising step in this direction. </span></p>						</div>
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							<p>Michèle Hehn is a retired secondary school teacher in the Centre de services scolaires de Montréal. She has written for <em>Socialist Worker</em>, <em>The Indypendent</em>, <em>Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme</em>, and <em>Ricochet Media</em>.</p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/union-democracy-and-quebecs-historic-public-sector-strikes/">Union Democracy and Quebec’s Historic Public Sector Strikes</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-student-encampment-movement-is-part-of-a-history-of-militant-struggle-against-settler-colonialism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-student-encampment-movement-is-part-of-a-history-of-militant-struggle-against-settler-colonialism</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:39:33 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Interventions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Carlson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing strategies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organizing tactics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settler colonialism]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=8020</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>John Carlson on the links between the student encampment movement for Palestinian liberation and Indigenous-led struggle against settler colonialism from Turtle Island to Palestine.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-student-encampment-movement-is-part-of-a-history-of-militant-struggle-against-settler-colonialism/">The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">6. 7. 2024</h3><h1>The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><br /><strong>John Carlson</strong><br /></span></strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />Since the mid-to-late nineteenth century, settler colonialism in Canada has been a social project of mobilizing masses of people to consolidate a society grounded on generalized commodity production and exchange: the capitalist system. The dispossession of Indigenous nations from our lands and the reduction of Indigenous people’s political power have been essential to the development and reproduction of a white-supremacist class society, grounded on the colonial divide between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Central to that project is what many Indigenous and settler-colonial studies scholars call the logic of elimination: the colonial acquisition of land through the attempted comprehensive destruction of Indigenous nations as sovereignties that compete with settler sovereignty, and of Indigenous societies as forms of social practice founded on radically egalitarian and democratic norms.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This logic of elimination has been instituted in a variety of ways – from the Canadian state to Palestine. These range from state-sanctioned genocidal violence, such as the deliberate withholding of food on the Prairies in the nineteenth century; to the systematic abandonment of Indigenous communities today, who are forced to drag rivers in search of their missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit (MMIWG2S+) kin; to the settler working-class violence and brutality that has claimed the lives of many, including </span><a href="http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumell/chapter1.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Helen Betty Osborne</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and, more recently, </span><a href="https://thewalrus.ca/looking-for-justice-finding-betrayal/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Barbara Kentner</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. In all cases, it expresses the reality of a society created, reproduced, and structured around systematic violence and repression. Although no longer sustained through open war and military campaigns as in Israel, settler colonialism in Canada is a mediated form of domination that permeates all spheres of social life.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, the historical process through which settler colonialism has evolved cannot be understood simply in terms of domination. It must be grasped equally as a result of Indigenous agency. While the logic of elimination on Turtle Island was virtually unfettered and aimed at the complete destruction of Indigenous nations for a century and a half of settler-colonial rule, over time Indigenous organizing has coerced the state and capital to reform the colonial relation. Above all, this history has been driven by the self-activity of Indigenous grassroots activists and organizations, which have been forced to struggle outside state-sanctioned and legally authorized forms of political activity. From the </span><a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/featured/2015/11/21/the-riots-that-werent"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kenora March of 1965</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, to the </span><a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/the-truth-about-the-anicinabe-park-occupation-of-1974-linda-finlayson/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Occupation of Anicinabe Park</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and the </span><a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/when-people-are-calling-you-go-an-indigenous-womans-account-of-the-native-peoples-caravan-1974/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Native People’s Caravan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in the mid-’70s, down to the major resistance against the Canadian army at </span><a href="https://activehistory.ca/blog/2020/07/31/remember-resist-redraw-24-30-years-since-the-siege-of-kanehsatake/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kanehstà:ke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 1990 and the </span><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/3/4/our-hearts-bled-covering-the-wetsuweten-crisis-in-canada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wet’suwet’en Uprising of 2020</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Indigenous peoples have organized autonomously in the form of occupations, camps, blockades, and travelling campaigns, among other tactics. In these ways, they have developed a coercive counter-power capable of enforcing their inherent rights as sovereign nations denied to them by the state – meeting colonial and capitalist power head on.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">During the </span><a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/10/05/native-alliance-for-red-power-eight-point-program-1969/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Red Power</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> era of the late ’60s and early ’70s, these tactics were anchored in a political strategy of </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/canadian-revolution/19760603.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Third Worldism</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which conceived Indigenous self-determination and national liberation in North America as intrinsically related to the liberation of all colonized nations around the world, </span><a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2021/12/19/palestinians-and-native-people-are-brothers/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">including Palestine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Those nations were explicitly understood as kin in struggle, oppressed by a single, totalizing global imperialism. Although settler colonialism remains a structural reality in Canada, Indigenous peoples’ courageous and defiant militant labour – including but certainly not limited to that of the Red Power period – has made inroads towards partially mitigating the violence of the colonial system, and towards establishing the possibility of more radical, systemic social transformation.  </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We see the necessity of this kind of politics also in today’s student-led encampment movement for Palestinian liberation. The students courageously organizing and sustaining the encampments with their labour demonstrate, once again, the need to organize autonomously beyond the narrow, repressive norms of dominant political and institutional processes – to raise the critique of Israeli settler colonialism and the genocide of Palestinians, as well as expose the complicity of Canadian imperialism and the universities with which the students have an immediate relation. In the same way as Indigenous struggle here has restored dignity and transformed individuals and collectives – developing their knowledge and capacities for self-determination, as well as fostering the relations of solidarity among Indigenous peoples and anti-colonial settlers necessary for a new society – the students active in the encampment movement are cultivating a transformative practice: one that develops their knowledge, and builds their capacities and relations for the kind of political struggle we need if we’re to challenge settler colonialism on Turtle Island and in Palestine.   </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Crucially, more than a simple analogy between settler colonialism in Canada and in Palestine is at play. Both colonial projects are shaped by many of the same social relations, central among which are imperialist tendencies grounded on capitalist relations of production, with their structural imperative of endless capital accumulation and expansion. These dynamics not only drive settler colonialism on Turtle Island and facilitate the colonization of Palestine, but they also lead to geopolitical competition for domination of the entire Middle East, involving Western powers along with other imperialist powers such as China and Russia.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Due to the structural power of these ruling-class relations, the struggle against settler colonialism in Canada and the struggle for national liberation in Palestine must develop the radical working-class struggle as a whole: creating the leverage to enhance the effective power of our grassroots autonomous activity and organizations, and confronting the long-term challenge of transforming our relations with the earth and each other, beyond the dehumanizing confines of a global society that necessitates settler colonialism to sustain itself. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ndinawemaaganag &#8211; All My Relations </span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">John Carlson is Kingfisher clan Anishinaabe and a member of the Red Rock Indian Band. He is also an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa in the department of Criminology. </span></p><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The analysis and connections elaborated in this brief article were made possible by the brave and committed work of INSAF uOttawa and the Palestinian Students Association, who are leading the student encampment at the University of Ottawa with support from Students for Justice in Palestine and Independent Jewish Voices from Carleton University.</span></i></p>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/the-student-encampment-movement-is-part-of-a-history-of-militant-struggle-against-settler-colonialism/">The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>EVERY LONG POEM FEELS LIKE A GOODBYE / THIS IS NOT A LONG POEM</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/every-long-poem-feels-like-a-goodbye-this-is-not-a-long-poem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=every-long-poem-feels-like-a-goodbye-this-is-not-a-long-poem</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 12:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Poetry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Camila Valle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wonder]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=7973</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>"we are still / waiting for a rebirth / of wonder by the waves" ~ A new poem by Camila Valle.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/every-long-poem-feels-like-a-goodbye-this-is-not-a-long-poem/">EVERY LONG POEM FEELS LIKE A GOODBYE / THIS IS NOT A LONG POEM</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-people-walking-around-a-fair-AOgHmkWnUAM" target="_blank">Photo: Rika Ichinose/Unsplash</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">5. 15. 2024</h3><h1 style="text-align: left;">EVERY LONG POEM FEELS LIKE A GOODBYE / THIS IS NOT A LONG POEM</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><b><br /></b><strong>Camila Valle</strong></h3><hr /><div><p><br />a train crosses a border<br />windows that won’t open<br />from the inside or<br />from the outside can’t<br />outstretch my hand<br />to touch the passing leaves<br />7 million afternoon glows<br />I press my palms<br />to the glass<br />the leaves were made<br />for everyone but we<br />sit boxed in<br />tumbling through land<br />stolen cleared<br />tracks laid by human<br />hands and sweat snaking<br />one after the other<br />sometimes<br />when I lie down<br />at the park sun in my face<br />I think<br />only rich people were allowed to<br />do this for like hundreds of years<br />but not for most of human<br />history isn’t that wild<br />floating over the ocean<br />we must answer to a man<br />in a vest with a gun<br />a tiny plastic box with my face<br />stamped on it<br />I am the box little and green<br />rumbling listening<br />to a saxophone or a clarinet<br />I am sorry<br />for closing my eyes and<br />not being able to make<br />out its shape carved out<br />of trees I will never see<br />another instrument assembled<br />by human hands and wind<br />a melodic expanse growing<br />the car sways<br />from side to side I half-expect<br />to graze a wall<br />of rock on our way and burst<br />like the universe did<br />on the staircase in 1971<br />my mother as a child<br />mistakes a condom for fallen<br />candy and dismayed turns<br />it over to her grandmother<br />all the doors closed all<br />the lights turned on<br />ceiling radiance<br />after ceiling radiance<br />seeping out from the bedroom<br />the sun<br />sets the trees orange<br />in an empty subway car<br />I watch it glide<br />behind a building free<br />on the boardwalk the sky<br />is pink and salty<br />a man plays a violin<br />an older couple slow dances<br />a puerto rican flag waves<br />sometimes coney island<br />is the most magical place<br />on earth<br />I share a birthday<br />with the wonder wheel<br />and agnès varda<br />and memorial day until 1971<br />two years before the united states<br />ended conscription and<br />henry kissinger who<br />somehow is not dead<br />won the nobel peace prize<br />for napalming vietnam<br />more than 7 million neon clouds<br />they almost look like trees<br />sprouting deadly in laos<br />nearly one ton<br />for every person and<br />we are still<br />waiting for a rebirth<br />of wonder by the waves<br />I cradle<br />the sounds like sets of parentheses<br />on the first valentine’s day<br />I spend alone<br />a man swaying crooning<br />to marvin gaye’s I want you<br />on the subway platform<br />and I felt that<br />(it’s too bad it’s just too sad)<br />I am sure there is a saxophone on that<br />cover ernie barnes painted<br />in 1971<br />I buy a man<br />I don’t know<br />a sandwich and a blanket<br />he drapes over himself<br />soft black wings and says<br />I love you in so many ways<br />right now I hope<br />you have 7 million babies<br />7 million babies with names<br />like hope and luz<br />I would sip mate<br />and bounce them on my lap<br />years would pass<br />and one day<br />they would be 13 or 14<br />and cry<br />because jim morrison<br />died in a bathtub in paris<br />on a july morning in 1971<br />and agnès varda<br />was one of five people<br />at his funeral<br />they would board a train<br />crossing borders<br />real and imagined<br />with their 7 million dreams<br />and reach<br />for the light</p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /><em>written before the death of Henry Kissinger in November 2023</em><br /></span></p></div>						</div>
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							<div dir="auto"><p>Camila Valle is a writer, editor, translator, and abortion <i>acompañante</i> and educator. Her work has appeared in <i>Interview</i>, <i>’68 to ’05</i>, <i>Science for the People</i>, <i>In The Mood Magazine</i>, and <i>Spectre Journal</i>, among other publications. Her translation of <i>Set Fear on Fire: The Feminist Call that Set the Americas Ablaze</i> by the Chilean feminist performance collective LASTESIS is out from Verso Books.</p></div>						</div>
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					<div class="elementor-shortcode"><div class="crp_related  crp_related_shortcode    crp-text-only"><h3>Related:</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/moments-of-vast-possibility/"     class="crp_link post-5937"><span class="crp_title">Moments of Vast Possibility</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Solidarity Winnipeg’s Jesslyn Best and Leslie Ep discuss utopias, popular uprisings, gender and sexual freedom, communist politics, and speculative fiction with M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, the authors of the new book Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/protest-and-pleasure-a-revolution-led-by-sex-workers/"     class="crp_link post-3820"><span class="crp_title">Protest & Pleasure: A Revolution Led by Sex Workers</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> A conversation with Monica Forrester, Toni-Michelle Williams, and Chanelle Gallant about why trans women of colour sex workers are the leaders we need, lighting the way to revolutionary horizons.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/what-we-mean-by-community-is-our-yearning-for-communism/"     class="crp_link post-7485"><span class="crp_title">What We Mean by Community is Our Yearning for Communism</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> M.E. O’Brien on family abolition and the communizing of care as political horizons worth fighting for. A conversation with Midnight Sun editor David Camfield.</span></li><li><a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/festivals-of-the-possible/"     class="crp_link post-4080"><span class="crp_title">Festivals of the Possible</span></a><span class="crp_excerpt"> Megan Kinch on the Occupy movement, which erupted 10 years ago: its particular blend of spontaneity, organization, and technology; the forms it took in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada; and its mixed legacies. A personal and political reflection.</span></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div></div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/every-long-poem-feels-like-a-goodbye-this-is-not-a-long-poem/">EVERY LONG POEM FEELS LIKE A GOODBYE / THIS IS NOT A LONG POEM</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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